Julie Beck | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/2018-08-01T15:26:37-04:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>Social media has now been around long enough that teens who grew up with it are now adults who can make art about that experience. If stereotypes about young people and the internet were true, one might expect such art to be narcissistic or shallow or Instagrammy. But <em>Eighth Grade, </em>a new movie written and directed by Bo Burnham, a former YouTube star, is generous and deep, and makes room for all the facets of its protagonist’s self, not just the shiniest, most camera-ready ones.</p><p>In the film, a 13-year-old girl named Kayla is feeling her way through the dark forest of middle-school social life. On-screen, the scenery keeps changing: How should she act in the classroom? At a popular classmate’s pool party? At the mall with a new group of friends? And is she a totally different person on the internet, in the vlogs she makes in which she offers advice and pep talks? “Being yourself can be hard,”<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnesHAtSHzs">she says</a>, “and it’s like, ‘Aren’t I always being myself?’” Kayla’s sweet and stumbling attempts to answer that question in these different scenarios—in real life and online—are the driving force of the movie.</p><p>Burnham, like Kayla, was extremely online in his youth; unlike Kayla, he got famous for it—YouTube videos he shot of himself performing funny songs led to a comedy career, and now a film career. What a life lived publicly online seems to have given Burnham is the humility <em>not </em>to present himself as an expert on “kids these days” or as a moral authority on the dangers of social media. The beauty of the internet, he says, is that kids are telling and showing the world what their lives are like, and to understand them, one need only pay attention.</p><p>I spoke to Burnham about what makes middle school a unique phase of life, and all the varied social arenas kids have to navigate while trying to figure out who they are. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.</p><hr><p><strong>Julie Beck: </strong>I feel like it’s really rare to see a coming-of-age story set in middle school. It’s much more often high school or even college. What was compelling to you about this age in particular? Why go for middle school?</p><p><strong>Bo Burnham: </strong>I think eighth grade is a time where your self-awareness is just flicked on like a light. All of a sudden you look at yourself and you’re like, “Oh my God, have I been this the whole time?” And then you’re trying to build a parachute as you’re falling.</p><p>There’s a transparency to the way the kids socialize at that age that I think is very beautiful. Who you are, who you’re trying to be, and how you’re trying to be it are all very clean and clear and visible. You’re not really fooling anybody.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Whereas later in your teenhood you think there’s more obfuscation?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>Yeah. We just start to smooth it over and it starts to look like one piece. By the time we’re adults, we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re just one person, and I don’t think it’s true. I think they’re living a more honest, true version of what we all are.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Which is what?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>We’re lying, we’re performing, we’re desperate for attention and love, and trying to negotiate the world. With kids, it feels like a grandfather clock. You can see into it, you can see the mechanisms of it.</p><p>I wanted to make a movie about people expressing themselves on the internet. When 30-year-olds post on the internet, we just hate them because it’s like, “Ugh, why are you doing this?” But when a 13-year-old does it, you’re like, “Aw, you’re just trying to be cool.” But we’re all just trying to be cool, so maybe we can understand where it’s coming from.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>How much did you talk to current teens, and to women and girls in particular, about what that age is or was like for them?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>The good thing is, if you want to learn about kids this age now, they’re posting everything about themselves online. So I was watching hundreds of videos of girls talking about their life and their experience. It’s almost better than me being able to talk to them because it’s not on my turf, it’s on their YouTube channel, with 20 subscribers. I was able to observe and take that in without it being in the format of: Okay, you’re talking to an adult about your experience.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s sort of like<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)"> the scientific principle</a> where if you’re observing the thing, then you’re changing it.</p><p><strong>Burnham:</strong> It is exactly that. That observing does change it. Of course they think they’re being observed by all their subscribers. But that change felt true and honest. That felt almost more honest than if they weren’t being watched.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>How so?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>Who you hope you are, to me, is a more vulnerable and honest truth than who you fear you might be. We live in an age of confessionalism and not a lot of hope. I feel way more comfortable admitting my fears than my hopes. So, to me, it was a very honest, brave thing these kids are doing. But it’s sort of characterized as lying—all these kids are online and they’re lying about themselves. No, they’re trying to speak themselves into existence, which is actually a very beautiful thing.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Kayla is doing what a lot of kids are doing at that age, which is intensely and deliberately isolating themselves from their parents. She’s trying to hide everything she’s doing online from her dad. But at that age kids still really need their parents in a lot of ways, even though they’re trying to hide from them. And you do see how much Kayla still needs her dad even though she’s been pushing him away. How did you think about trying to show that push and pull?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>You want independence, and you also want affirmation. You want “Leave me alone,” and also “Drive me to the mall.” Sitting in the front seat being driven by your parent is just such a strong metaphor for the lack of autonomy you have at that age. You’re seat belted into it. You’ve moved from the car seat in the back to the front seat but you have no more freedom. A lot of the struggle at that age is: Who doesn’t want the love of their parent? And at that age you also think you want to be strong enough to not need that love.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>There’s one point in the movie where Kayla is hanging out with some high schoolers who have their minds blown by the fact that she had Snapchat in fifth grade. One of them, a guy, says something along the lines of: <em>There are wildly different microgenerations even among people who are currently teens, because the technology is changing so fast and today’s eighth grader is exposed to different stuff than an eighth grader from three years ago even</em>. And then another one of the high schoolers says something like, “Oh that isn’t true, don’t make her feel like an alien. All that changing technology doesn’t change people that much.” My question is: Which of them do you agree with?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>Both, I think. I mean, the guy that’s saying all that stuff is also just being a dickhead who thinks he’s philosophizing but is actually hurting people’s feelings. But also: “She’s wired different,” “She’s not wired different”—I think both are true. There’s a timelessness about being that age that doesn’t change. And there also is something very timely that is changing.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>School and the internet are these twin social arenas—they’re related and they interconnect, but they’re not the same. And it seemed like, from my perspective at least, Kayla was originally a very different person in each of those social arenas, and over the course of the movie those selves are scooting closer together. How did you think about these two different social arenas?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>I think there’s a lot of social arenas. There’s the social arena in the world at school. I think there’s multiple arenas online. There’s a social arena in your head; there’s a social arena in your house. There’s a social arena when you’re in public around strangers; there’s a social arena when you’re in public with your friends. Who are you and do you change just because you’re different in different circumstances? Is that a lie? Is that a problem? I don’t really know what the answer is. But I think that’s the problem people struggle with now: We just feel atomized. How do you then try to cobble together a sense of yourself in the middle of that?</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Kayla gets this time capsule from herself in sixth grade, with a very poignant message that she left for her future self. It occurred to me that this is one way you could think about growing up on the internet—that you’re just constantly making time capsules for your future self, and you can track your life and your growth in that way. Maybe that is a gentler way of thinking about it than the “The internet is forever so you better watch out!” scare tactic sort of way that we often think about it. Though that is also true.</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>That was the intention, to talk about time and permanence and whatever. What does it mean to be present to your future self always? What does it mean to have access to the way you were thinking? Is it necessarily bad? Can you communicate with yourself in a way? The relationship of social media across time, we don’t really think of emotionally. We only think of it as like the way you said, that sort of scare tactic: “Oh no, you’re going to get fired for something you said!” There’s another emotional, weird self-communication thing happening.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>What is your emotional relationship to your own social-media history?</p><p><strong>Burnham: </strong>It does communicate to you. It lets you know: This is what I loved; this is what I thought was funny; this is what I thought was interesting; this is what my values were. You’re going to be able to consult more than your memories for who you were. And that’s a complicated thing. I’ve had to wrestle with myself in the past for a long time—I’m just all out there. I’m happy to be an out-loud example of a life lived and a life changed. Living from 16 to 27 online, you can literally go month by month and see my morality form or my value system form. And that’s important, to see how we actually do change. That’s what it is documenting—it’s documenting change. We should be aware that what we’re seeing is not necessarily us—it’s the story of us, over time.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedLinda Kallerus / A24Bo Burnham and Elsie Fisher on the set of <i>Eighth Grade</i>In Middle School, ‘You’re Trying to Build a Parachute as You’re Falling’2018-08-01T13:21:11-04:002018-08-01T15:26:37-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-566579The director Bo Burnham discusses his new movie, <em>Eighth Grade, </em>and how kids cobble together their identities, on the internet and off.<p>For journalists, being hated is part of the job.</p><p>People will hate things you write, and they’ll tell you. They’ll hate the media in general, and they’ll let you know. They may hate you for your race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation; thanks to the visibility that comes with the job, you’ll hear about that, too. In the age of email and social media, it seems like more than ever, hateful messages are the cost of doing business in the news business.</p><p>Five staffers at the <em>Capital Gazette</em> in Annapolis were killed on Thursday by a shooter with a long-standing grudge against the newspaper. The man had been harassing the paper and its employees since 2011, <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ramos-search-20180628-story.html">according to <em>The Baltimore Sun</em></a><em>,</em> and he had also personally threatened the <em>Gazette’s </em>former editor and publisher, Thomas Marquardt, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/06/the-capital-gazette-shooting-local-journalism/564104/?utm_source=feed">as my colleague Emma Green reported.</a> Marquardt told Green he wasn’t surprised when he learned who the suspect was.</p><p>In the aftermath, Libby Nelson, the news editor at <em>Vox, </em>tweeted: “Every journalist knows their version of That Guy. And most of us just shrug it off and laugh about it, because what else are you going to do? The idea that they might do something about it—if that’s what happened here—is bone-chilling.” Perhaps motivated by a similar worry, police officers in Chicago and New York <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nypd-deploys-to-media-outlets-out-of-caution-after-capital-gazette-shooting/">were deployed</a> to several major media outlets on Thursday after the shooting.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Every journalist knows their version of That Guy. And most of us just shrug it off and laugh about it, because what else are you going to do?<br><br>
The idea that they might do something about it — if that’s what happened here — is bone-chilling.</p>
— Libby Nelson (@libbyanelson) <a href="https://twitter.com/libbyanelson/status/1012499207759056896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>The majority of Americans <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/pj_2017-05-10_media-attitudes_a-05/">do not trust</a> the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/212852/confidence-newspapers-low-rising.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&amp;g_medium=TOPIC&amp;g_campaign=item_&amp;g_content=In%2520U.S.%2c%2520Confidence%2520in%2520Newspapers%2520Still%2520Low%2520but%2520Rising">news media.</a> There are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/why-do-americans-distrust-the-media/500252/?utm_source=feed">many complex reasons why</a>, and there’s enough blame to go around to many different parties, journalists included. So it’s hardly surprising that they get some rude messages. “But I’m not talking about the rudeness. I’m talking about intimidation,” says Elana Newman, a psychologist who works with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. “I’ve been working for the Dart Center for 20 years in some capacity, and when we used to ask people what the most stressful parts of journalism are, they would talk about the hours, or getting it right. They would talk about all sorts of things. Now what comes up is really this kind of stuff.”</p><p>According to <a href="https://dartcenter.org/content/journalists-and-harassment">research</a> by the psychologist Kelsey Parker in 2015, 63 percent of journalists from several English-speaking countries said they had experienced occupational intimidation in the previous 12 months. Globally, almost two-thirds of female journalists “experienced acts of ‘intimidation, threats, and abuse’ in relation to their work,” <a href="https://newssafety.org/uploads/IWMF.FINALA.PDF">a report </a>from the International Women’s Media Foundation and the International News Safety Institute found. Another <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2016.1164614">study</a>, of Swedish journalists<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2016.1164614">,</a> found that a third had experienced a threat in the past year. A far greater number—74 percent—had received “abusive comments which are unpleasant but do not involve any direct threat.”</p><p>Journalists have had their <a href="http://thehill.com/media/340888-cnn-reporters-family-receives-harassing-phone-calls-over-reddit-report">families harassed</a>, had their addresses and other personal information published (a practice known as <a href="https://www.poynter.org/news/dangers-journalism-include-getting-doxxed-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it">doxxing</a>), and had <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/security-reporter-tells-ars-about-hacked-911-call-that-sent-swat-team-to-his-house/"><span class="smallcaps">SWAT</span> teams</a> sent to their houses by trolls.</p><p>“Raise your hand if you know (or are) a journalist who has received a death threat in the last year,” Sam Escobar, the digital deputy director of <em>Allure </em>magazine, tweeted on Thursday after the shooting. The tweet received replies from journalists on every beat imaginable—health, politics, music, gender, tech, beauty—and a cartoonist.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Raise your hand if you know (or are) a journalist who has received a death threat in the last year.</p>
— Sam H. Escobar (@myhairisblue) <a href="https://twitter.com/myhairisblue/status/1012512761941757952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Some of my colleagues shared stories with me of their own experiences. “A man once told me to kill myself and that he wanted me dead because he didn’t like my review of the movie <em>Sing</em>,” said Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at <em>The Atlantic</em>. “Then he left threatening Instagram comments on a picture of me and my baby niece, and the cops got involved. It was scary but also absurd because it was related to a movie about a singing koala.”</p><p>Caroline Kitchener, an associate editor who works on the <em>The Atlantic</em>’s membership program, told me about a time she wrote a piece on political extremism and went on C-SPAN to talk about it. Afterward, the members of the subreddit The_Donald, an online forum for Donald Trump supporters that, as Kitchener explained in her piece, is “often associated with the alt-right,” found pictures of her on Google and “put them on The_Donald with Pepe the Frog between my legs,” she said. Pepe, a cartoon frog often used in racist memes, is classified as a hate symbol by the <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog">Anti-Defamation League</a>.</p><p>All of this takes its toll, affecting both job performance and journalists’ mental health. “There are few studies of the impact of harassment on journalists,” a report from the Dart Center reads, but individual journalists have reported symptoms including “anxiety attacks,” “insomnia,” “ weight loss,” “extreme and excessive vigilance,” and “social isolation.”</p><p>In the Swedish study, 17 percent of respondents avoided covering certain issues or people because of comments they received. Sixty-eight percent felt hurt by the comments. Nine percent of respondents had considered quitting the profession altogether because of them. How did they cope? Mostly by just trying to ignore it. The researchers found that after receiving threats, 66 percent of the time, journalists did nothing. This was the case 85 percent of the time for “abusive comments.”</p><p>It can feel wrong to dwell on your own relatively minor hostile encounters when in the course of your job you are exposed to the breadth and depth of human suffering. Many of my colleagues who reached out to me with stories qualified them by saying in the scheme of things it wasn’t that bad, or that other people had surely experienced worse.</p><p>“You’re used to reporting on others and not becoming part of the news,” Newman says. “So I understand that. But it’s not a reason not to be safe. Yes, it’s true: You are privileged. But when your life is in danger? That’s a freedom-of-the-press issue. At what point does it become a way of preventing journalists from telling stories that need to be told? I understand that it feels self-indulgent. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t an important opportunity for people to understand the risks that journalists are taking.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>“Our results show that intimidation and harassment indeed constitute an effective way to silence journalists, even in the context of a stable democratic society like Sweden,” the researchers behind the Swedish study wrote. This might also be effective in the United States, where the far-right extremist Milo Yiannopolous has said, “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight” in response to requests for comment on stories, according to <a href="http://observer.com/2018/06/milo-yiannopoulos-encourages-vigilantes-start-gunning-journalists-down/">the <em>Observer</em></a><em>.</em> Where President Donald Trump, at a rally three days before the Annapolis shooting, <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/enemies-and-anthems/">referred to the press </a>as “the enemy of the people,” a preferred term of his. (Trump has since offered his condolences to the victims; when <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/29/cnns_jim_acosta_mr_president_will_you_stop_calling_the_press_the_enemies_of_the_people.html">CNN’s Jim Acosta shouted to Trump to ask</a> if he would stop using the phrase, he did not respond.) And where on Reddit and other forums, <a href="https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/1012426752533106688">people celebrated the news</a> of the <em>Gazette</em> journalists’ deaths.</p><p>Threats and hateful messages are an occupational hazard for all working journalists. But it’s sometimes hard to tell where the line is between an annoyance and a danger. How do you know when the threats are real? When a hailstorm of emails might transmute into a shower of bullets?</p><p>“What makes this so difficult,” Newman says, “is we can’t tell what’s a disagreement and what’s a threat. You can tell at the extremes ... [but] it’s the middle stuff that has everybody confused.”</p><p>The <em>Capital Gazette</em> on Thursday lived through a journalist’s worst fear upon receiving such a message. But through the grief, despite whatever intimidation the shooter may have intended, the <em>Capital Gazette </em>journalists honored their colleagues in the best way they could: They <a href="http://digitaledition.capitalgazette.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?pubid=8b1fea6b-b045-4d93-97a0-18b26dbb2c3b">put out a paper</a>. They told their stories anyway.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedDrew Angerer / GettyMembers of the New York City Police Department stand outside the headquarters of The New York Times following a shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland.Hateful Messages Are an Occupational Hazard of Journalism2018-06-30T08:00:00-04:002018-07-02T10:27:16-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-564221The stress of dealing with them wears on reporters, and it can be hard to know when they mean real danger.<p>How many exclamation points does it take to exclaim something? One, a human of sound mind and a decent grasp of punctuation might say. The exclamation point <em>denotes</em> exclamation. That is its point. One should suffice.</p><p>But, on the internet, it often doesn’t. Not anymore. Digital communication is undergoing exclamation-point inflation. When single exclamation points adorn every sentence in a business email, it takes two to convey true enthusiasm. Or three. Or four. Or more.</p><p>I noticed this in my own social circles recently. Multiple exclamation points were popping up in mundane places, not attached to hyperbole or any kind of frenzied emotion. A simple work email might yield a “Sounds good!!!” I find myself doing it, too.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>“All of these quirks of social media—that would include exclamation points, and all caps, and repetition of letters, those are the three main ones that show enthusiasm—people use more of them,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.</p><p>This sort of inflation is a natural linguistic phenomenon that regularly happens to words, like how <em>awesome</em> was once reserved for that which truly struck awe into a quavering heart and is now scarcely more than a verbal thumbs up. But this time it’s happening to punctuation.</p><p>It wasn’t so long ago that a single exclamation point still felt extreme. One <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=1cSRqpspILcC&amp;pg=PA149&amp;lpg=PA149&amp;dq=exclamation+point+extreme&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=U_FBqu70jx&amp;sig=aEnaroWYxPS6lqzHCXGEgh3dCZg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiCk_uYg_TbAhXNqFkKHSq2BKo4FBDoAQhJMAY#v=onepage&amp;q=exclamation%20point%20extreme&amp;f=false">grammar guide from 2005</a> says the exclamation point “indicates extreme pain, fear, astonishment, anger, disgust, or yelling.” At journalism school, I was told that you get one exclamation point to use in your entire career, so you should use it wisely. You could, perhaps, spend your one exclamation point on a headline like “WAR OVER!” but nothing less would merit one. (I’m sure I’ve already spent beyond my means, don’t email me.) The writer Elmore Leonard had a similar rule for fiction: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose,” he once wrote, though he <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/curb-your-enthusiasm/513833/?utm_source=feed">apparently didn’t abide by that</a>.</p><p>There was never any shortage of exclamation points online, nor a shortage of <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2007/08/so_many_exclamation_points.html">curmudgeons</a> to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/its-time-fix-americas-email-exclamation-point-addiction/328535/?utm_source=feed">bemoan their ubiquity</a>. But there were some who welcomed our enthusiastic new punctuation overlords. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, in their 2007 email etiquette guide <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781841959948">Send</a></em>, were particularly prescient. “The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat email’s essential lack of tone,” they wrote. So long as email failed to convey affect, they predicted, “we will continue to sprinkle exclamation points liberally throughout our emails.”</p><p>They were right. Eventually, most people seemed to stop resisting their rise. In 2012, a <em>Boston Globe </em>columnist <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2012/04/25/how-mail-and-texting-have-driven-people-overuse-exclamation-points-confessions-serial-exclamation-pointer/bSKe7sq0TEZLHcq1bq5A7M/story.html">found himself</a> giving in to the pressure. “I could feel the shame creeping into my fingertips the first few times I started adding this faux emphasis to pleasantries,” he wrote. “Now there is no turning back.”</p><p>Indeed, there is not. And it’s because somewhere along the line, the meaning of the mark itself shifted.</p><p>“Once exclamation points were scary and loud; they made you jump,” Heidi Julavits wrote in her 2015 memoir <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780804171441">The Folded Clock</a>.</em> “You were in trouble when the exclamation points came out. They were the nunchucks of punctuation. They were a bark, a scold, a gallows sentence. Not any longer. The exclamation point is lighthearted, even whimsical.”</p><p>Much like <em>awesome </em>once served a greater purpose, the exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm or intensity to a symbol that indicates politeness and friendliness. As Shipley and Schwalbe put it in their guide: “Exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth.” And that’s what we use them for now.</p><p>“The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker,” says Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication. “If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.”</p><p>The pressure to use exclamation points can sometimes feel stifling—a trap Tannen calls “enthusiasm constraint.” The belts on this particular straitjacket are tighter for women, as many <a href="http://nl.ijs.si/janes/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/waseleski06.pdf">studies have shown</a>; exclamation points can be a sort of <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2017/07/sorry-bothering-you-emotional-labour-female-emails">emotional labor</a> women have to perform to be liked, especially in the workplace. But since so much communication now occurs in text form, with no tone, body language, or facial expressions adorning it, it makes sense that we’ve found another way to smooth interactions. And it seems this meaning of the exclamation point has stabilized, and is intuitively understood by most internet users.</p><p>“It’s been totally normalized—at least in my view,” says Jonny Sun, a doctoral student at MIT who studies online communities. “I think the single exclamation point is now very acceptable.”</p><p>One could say that Sun is professionally enthusiastic. He is best known for <a href="https://twitter.com/jonnysun">his Twitter account</a>, where he mixes <a href="https://twitter.com/jonnysun/status/765323902771949569">silly jokes</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/jonnysun/status/398680920091557888">bittersweet humor</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/jonnysun/status/666395434169049089">earnest aphorisms</a>. He also wrote <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062569028">a graphic novel based on his Twitter</a>. And he uses a lot of exclamation points, especially when he replies to friends or fans. A single one, he says, is so expected at this point that it doesn’t really feel sincere anymore.</p><p>“I feel like it’s a stand-in and it doesn’t really connote an authentic emotion,” he says. “A single exclamation point is sort of like: Here’s me showing that I’m being nice and cordial. But two exclamation points would be authentic excitement.”</p><p>McCulloch is friends with Sun on Twitter, and she told me she thinks she’s recently picked up the habit of using multiple exclamation points from him. “A year or two ago I would never have used multiple exclamation marks,” she said.</p><p>This is how that sort of language creep happens. Generally, it goes from younger people to older, from women to men, and from casual contexts to more formal ones, according to Tannen. “I would say [multiple exclamation points are] becoming more a part of our everyday idioms,” she says. “It’s moving from very private conversation to more public conversation. Rather than friends using it, the workplace would be an example of that.”</p><p>After we spoke, McCulloch ran a Twitter poll asking: “If I wanted to convey genuine enthusiasm to you, how many exclamation marks would I need?” After nearly 800 votes, the winner was three. McCulloch did a couple follow-up polls, too, asking the same question if the exclamation point was at the end of a sentence, or if it was sent just on its own. The spread looked a little different for each, but in both cases, most people thought one wasn’t enough.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">If I wanted to convey genuine enthusiasm to you, how many exclamation marks would I need?</p>
— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) <a href="https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1010226025534455808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 22, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">UPDATED POLL<br><br>
Genuine enthusiasm at the end of a sentence:</p>
— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) <a href="https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1010287878952271872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 22, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">UPDATED POLL 2<br><br>
Genuine enthusiasm all by itself:</p>
— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) <a href="https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1010288058715926528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 22, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>So where does it end? What happens if three exclamation points eventually seem like little more than a friendlier period?</p><p>“Probably it ends with switching to a different type of punctuation,” McCulloch says. If the exclamation point is working as a sincerity marker, once people tire of it, “maybe smileys will [become] more acceptable in business contexts.”</p><p>This tracks with an interesting theory Sun has about the relationship between sincerity and informal language online. On social media, writing in all caps or using no capitalization at all both feel more genuine than using proper capitalization. “I feel like sincerity, especially online is breaking down any formal affect that we’ve adopted with language,” Sun says. “Sincerity now online is lowercase, quickly typed so it’s fine if there are typos. But then typos become part of it. To me, keysmashing is the most sincere form of excitement.”</p><p>When informality becomes linked to sincerity, there’s room for it to cross over into formerly formal communication. You’re not chatting your colleague in all caps or peppering your email with exclamation points to be rude or overly familiar. You’re doing it to show you really mean what you’re saying.</p><p>But perhaps the most genuine enthusiasm requires no text at all. “Sometimes in place of a statement, I’ll just send a bunch of exclamation points in response to someone, with no words,” Sun says. “I think that’s just to denote pure excitement or pure joy.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedFrederick Florin / GettyRead This Article!!!2018-06-27T11:03:00-04:002018-06-27T11:56:57-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-563774How many exclamation points do you need to seem genuinely enthusiastic?<p>In the lead-up to Mother’s and Father’s Day, the greeting-card aisle presents doors to two alternate universes. One is a wonderland of blooming flora and boats bobbing on tranquil lakes, where grateful baby animals snuggle their protective parents and everyone speaks in heartfelt but generic verse. The other is a cartoon dystopia where crudely drawn characters<strong> </strong>live out a stereotypical parenting farce. Here, every child is an unmanageable hellion or a perfect angel, mothers are chore-obsessed disciplinarians who must physically hide from the endless demands of their mob of loin-fruit, and fathers are … off golfing. Or grilling. Or on the toilet. It’s basically <em>Family Circus</em>, but with more fart jokes and everybody’s constantly drinking because they hate their kids so much. But in a funny way.</p><p>In the week before each parental holiday this year, I visited my local Target and CVS to sample<strong> </strong>the cards on offer. While there were a few that had expansive notions of mothers’ and fathers’ responsibilities,<strong> </strong>for the most part, the themes and symbols of both sentimental and funny cards reflected a stark division of gender roles in parenting: In card-world, mothers do everything, and fathers are an afterthought.</p><p>The messaging isn’t subtle, either. Some cards are very clear about which parent is considered more important. “Happy Mother’s Day to a woman who does it all!,” read one card. “You work. You cook. You clean. You nurture … You crazy?!” But the woman on the inside of the card has a happy enough expression, even though each of her limbs is engaged in a different task. A month later I found a Father’s Day card that said: “Father’s Day is in June … Because about a month after Mother’s Day, somebody went ‘Hey, wait a minute!’” (In reality, it took much longer. President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a national U.S. holiday <a href="https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-date=509">in 1914</a>; it wasn’t <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2012/04/this-day-in-politics-075490">until 1972</a> that President Nixon made Father’s Day official.)</p><figure><img alt="" height="487" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/IMG_9241/2d15a60f1.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">The inside of a card that reads, on the outside: “Happy Mother’s Day to a woman who does it all! You work. You cook. You clean. You nurture …” (Julie Beck / The Atlantic)</figcaption></figure><p>A more scientific study of <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X14528711">the themes of Mother’s and Father’s Day cards</a> looked at a batch in 2010. The researchers, Carol Auster and Lisa Auster-Gussman (who, fittingly, are mother and daughter) came to this conclusion: “Ritualized holidays tend to support the status quo, and traditional ideologies of motherhood and fatherhood,” of mothers as nurturers, and fathers as providing more utilitarian support. “The portrayal of motherhood and fatherhood on the greeting cards is important because these cards may act as agents of socialization, shaping individuals’ perceptions, regardless of whether the cards reflect the reality of parenting,” the study goes on to say.</p><p>Mother’s Day cards, they found, were much more likely to have cursive lettering and pastel color palettes, especially featuring purple and pink, while Father’s Day cards used more “bold” colors, like blue, tan, black, and red, and often had “whimsical” fonts. Mother’s Day cards tended to feature flowers, leaves, butterflies, bees and dragonflies, and Father’s Day cards were decorated with tools, stars, cars, and men’s clothing (like ties).</p><p>In terms of content, Father’s Day cards emphasized supporting the family economically, imparting practical lessons, and being the best—far more “Number One Dad” or “Best Dad Ever” sort of cards than mothers had. “It was like they needed an award, but there wasn’t a lot of depth in what they were achieving,” says Auster-Gussman, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Minnesota.</p><p>In contrast, Mother’s Day cards focused a lot more on what the mothers were doing for their children. The cards in the study that mentioned “the little things you do” were, without exception, Mother’s Day cards, and cards that talked about making a child feel loved were much more likely to be for moms, too.</p><p>Eight years later, my batch of cards<strong> </strong>indicated that the messages haven’t gotten much subtler. Many Mother’s Day cards featured chores, or referenced how much mothers are expected to do for their kids. Father’s Day cards evoked leadership or strength, or portrayed the dad as a superhero (though there were a couple superhero mom cards, too.)</p><p>Cards for both genders jokingly suggested that parents turn to drink to cope with the stresses of raising kids—though in card-world, dads are always drinking beer, while moms love wine and cocktails, seemingly without exception.<strong> </strong>(<a href="https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/ajph.70.8.826">A public health study from 1980</a> expressed concern that greeting cards regularly suggest that “getting drunk is a natural and desirable concomitant of celebrations and that drunkenness is humorous, enjoyable, and harmless.”)</p><p>The fancier, more expensive cards for moms tended to feature rhinestones (a bejeweled dragonfly, in one notable example of Mother’s Day trope synergy), while high-end cards for dads were often given natural textures like leather or twine, or, once, the whole front flap was just a piece of wood. (“A strong father makes a strong family,” it read.)</p><p>There were many, many calls for moms to take the holiday to relax for once—by any means necessary. “This Mother’s Day, put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, lock the door, kick your feet up, and enjoy the peace and quiet,” one card read. And on the inside: “ … until they find a way in through the air ducts.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="472" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/ducts/0f365e8b3.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">(Julie Beck / The Atlantic)</figcaption></figure><p>“It seems to me they’re saying you’ve got this one day where you have the right to have a glass of wine, lock yourself in the bathroom, and not let anybody else in, but it’s only going to be a day,” Alexandra Jaffe says<strong> </strong>of the cards I showed her. Jaffe is a linguistic anthropologist at California State University, Long Beach, who has studied greeting cards. “Because the other 364 days, no one else in the family is going to do those things for you.”</p><p>One card suggested that even on Mother’s Day, harried mothers would find no respite. It ran through a “Mother’s Day Timeline” that started with “Awake at 6:00 a.m. to a kid stampede,” continued through errands and cleaning up kids’ toys, ending with “Fall fast asleep in the small corner of the bed the dog and husband haven’t taken.”</p><p>In Auster and Auster-Gussman’s study, they found that relaxing was a more prominent theme in Father’s Day cards. In my sample it seemed prevalent in both. “The difference I saw is when Mom was supposed to relax, it’s because she does so many things for the child,” says Auster, a professor of sociology at Franklin &amp; Marshall College. “It’s never quite clear to me what Dad is supposed to relax from.”</p><p>That’s because a lot of Father’s Day cards don’t show dads doing much actual parenting. Dads in cards are also busy, but they’re busy with their hobbies. They’re golfing, they’re grilling, they’re fixing things, they’re camping and fishing and hunting, they’re watching sports, they’re telling corny jokes. They’re also, even if it’s never made explicit, busy with work. At least, they’re often wearing ties.</p><p>A lot of these themes fit into the stereotypes of fathers as providers, or as absent and disengaged from their kids, or as people who show love through action but not in words. But there is one persistent theme that remains mysterious: How did farting come to be emblematic of fatherhood? This association makes intuitive sense to me—Father’s Day cards have been referencing farts as long as I can remember—but when I really question <em>why</em>, it seems utterly inscrutable. I asked everyone I spoke to for this story for their theories. Perhaps mothers are expected to be more polite, some said. “Who gets to flout society’s rules of decorum? People with power,” Jaffe said. “That’s an indirect kind of power.” “That” being farting.</p><p>“Another explanation,” she went on, “could be that it evokes the intimacy of the nuclear family. Where you can do those things, and that’s part of life within the family unit.” Personally, the best I could come up with was that there’s a stereotype of men being gross and animalistic, but that’s men generally. What does farting have to do with being a <em>father</em>?</p><p>Maybe nothing. These cards are “almost more about being a man than they are about being a father,” says Emily West, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680770903068241'">gender and greeting cards</a>.“You like pizza and relaxing. Is that about being a father, or is that about reasserting your hegemonic masculinity even though you’re a father and you perform care work?”</p><p>On the whole, there seemed to just be <em>more</em> symbols and tropes associated with fathers than with mothers. All those hobbies<strong>—</strong>boats and cars and beers and meat, and a surprising number of antlered mammals. Several cards featured an elk or a moose, meant, I assume, to evoke a majestic, rugged sort of masculinity, since, among antlered mammals, big antlers are signs of dominance, maturity, and sexual desirability.</p><p>Mother’s Day cards, in contrast, mostly featured people or text—the only recurring symbols, really, were wine, cocktails, chores, and flowers. “If what is most strongly associated with ideologies of motherhood is nurturing and caring, those in some senses are abstract,” Auster says, which could explain the discrepancy.</p><p>But there were also fewer funny Mother’s Day cards. Looking at all these cards in aggregate, one of the things that struck me most was how robust and extensive the shared vocabulary of dad humor is, and how comparatively meager the cultural lexicon of mom humor is.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="430" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/IMG_9140/72f5289b6.jpg" width="280"><figcaption class="caption">(Julie Beck / The Atlantic)</figcaption></figure><p>Auster and Auster-Gussman suggested that perhaps, in American culture, motherhood is too serious of a thing to joke about. Most of the funny Mother’s Day cards that there <em>were</em> oriented their humor around the high standards for or hard work of being a mother. One card showed two cartoon owls eating bag lunches. “My mom gets up early every morning to dig up fresh, grass-fed worms from organic soil,” one owl says. “My mom goes to the bait shop,” the other says. The inside<strong> </strong>reads: “Whatever works, right? #Keepinemalive. Happy Mama’s Day!” </p><p>“The scripts we have for motherhood traditionally, or normatively, fall so easily into sentimental expressions of love,” says John McMahon, a professor of political science at SUNY Plattsburgh. “And if that’s less acceptable, or less standard for dads, then we have to have something to fill that place, and we have to be creative about other cultural forms that fatherhood can take.” The cuddling animals and gratitude platitudes of the sappy cards seem to resonate more with stereotypical conceptions of motherhood, while funny cards might allow kids to express love to their fathers without getting too sentimental.</p><p>“Fathers are fair game to be made fun of in a way that moms are not,” West says. “For example, there’s a long history of the bumbling dad in sitcoms. I think fatherhood has been conceptualized as not as central to men’s identity, so it’s more open to making fun of … I think we just have more of a vocabulary around feeling [for] motherhood.”</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="426" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/IMG_9535/dd879cb36.jpg" width="307"><figcaption class="caption">(Julie Beck / The Atlantic)</figcaption></figure><p>There were several Father’s Day cards where the entire joke was that Dad doesn’t contribute to the family, and Mom does everything. “<em>Dadequate</em>:,” one said, in the style of a dictionary entry defining the word. “Meets Dad’s standards but is guaranteed not to live up to Mom’s.” Another listed a litany of questions under the heading “Stuff You Ask Mom,” and under “Stuff You Ask Dad” it just said, “Where’s Mom?” There’s a whole genre of cards designed for a celebration of fathers that essentially just tells them they’re useless.</p><p>Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards promote traditional and stereotypical ideas that still<b> </b>have power in American culture. But “they absolutely would not sell if they didn’t correspond to at least some dimension of lived reality, or an ideal that people hang on to,” Jaffe says. Perhaps the reason so many cards lean on stereotypes is that, when trying to come up with messages that will have the broadest appeal among American families, card companies find that these oversimplifications are reliable shared ground.</p><p>Still, greeting cards often fail to recognize less traditional family structures, or the ways that parents can transcend these gender norms. <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180612185124.htm">Dads are more involved with their kids than in previous eras, for one thing.</a></p><p>But a surprising subset of cards I saw did address underrepresented swaths of the parenting experience. There was a card recognizing nonbiological mothers that said “Motherhood requires love. Not DNA.” I saw one Father’s Day card<b> </b>for two dads. And I did find more emotional language in the Father’s Day cards than I expected—more mentions of love, and kindness. “When it comes to being a dad, you give all the love your heart can hold,” one reads. Another proclaims: “The best gift a man can give the world is to be a good father,” centering fatherhood in a man’s identity in the way motherhood is so often centered for women’s. And it’s no small thing that cards recognize all the labor that goes into motherhood, even though it often reads as a manic sort of laughing through tears and gritted teeth. </p><p>“I don’t think you’re ever going to see greeting-card representations on the cutting edge of where relationships and communication are,” West says. “Greeting cards will always be following, for the most part.” As culture moves toward a more expansive view of parenthood, there will be greeting cards, toddling awkwardly behind.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedPewara Nicropithak / ProStockStudio / Mitrija / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The AtlanticThe Terrible Stereotypes of Mother’s and Father’s Day Cards2018-06-15T08:00:00-04:002018-06-17T10:53:45-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-562808Dads love beer. Moms love wine. And greeting-card companies love gendered tropes about parenting.<p><em><small>If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.</small></em></p><p>Suicide is on the rise in the United States, but people still don’t know quite how to talk about it.</p><p>According to data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/06/more-americans-are-dying-from-suicide/562406/?utm_source=feed">suicide has risen by 30 percent in the United States between 1999 and 2016</a>. It is the tenth leading cause of death in the country. This news happened to come out the same week that two high-profile figures—the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/nyregion/kate-spade-suicide.html">fashion designer Kate Spade</a>, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/media/anthony-bourdain-dead.html">chef and food journalist Anthony Bourdain</a>—died, apparently of suicide.</p><p>Any celebrity death, regardless of cause, leads to a predictable pattern of behavior on social media, a unique and uncomfortable blend of public mourning, attention seeking, and “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/?utm_source=feed">grief policing</a>.” When a famous person’s death is a suicide, there are more layers—distribution of resources and hotlines, speculation about the deceased’s mental state, the sharing of personal struggles with mental illness, along with calls for destigmatization.</p><p>Much of this is well intentioned, just people processing the news together on the platforms we’ve grown accustomed to using for the processing of all things. But inevitably there are crass responses, too.</p><p>When it comes to suicide, the perverse incentives of the internet combined with human callousness can sometimes lead to incidents like a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/a-social-media-stars-error/549479/?utm_source=feed">YouTube star posting a joking video</a> about the dead body of an apparent suicide victim, or to publications responding to the suicide of a celebrity not with responsible journalism or thoughtful remembrances but shameless attempts for clicks. In the latest such case, <a href="https://splinternews.com/this-is-some-scummy-shit-newsweek-1826668548?utm_medium=socialflow&amp;utm_source=splinter_twitter&amp;utm_campaign=socialflow_splinter_twitter"><em>Newsweek</em> responded to Bourdain’s death on Friday</a> with a series of stories with headlines like “Who Is Anthony Bourdain’s Daughter, Ariane? Celebrity Chef Found Dead at 61” (which appears to have been later changed to “What Anthony Bourdain’s Daughter Ariane Said About His Cooking”), seemingly intended to wring traffic from search engines.</p><p>Death is always messy and hard to understand, suicide even more so. It’s a broad (and increasing) public-health problem with a million different faces, affected by many factors. Mental illness is one of them, but the CDC also found that experiences such as relationship problems, financial problems, loss of housing, and substance use, among others, contributed to some suicide deaths. The traumas and losses of people’s lives and the ways they respond to them are infinitely varied and context-dependent. And that makes suicide hard to talk about.</p><p>“We use the heart-disease analogy a lot, because in a lot of ways it fits suicide beautifully,” says Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “In addition to biological risk factors, life stressors, the environment, smoking, obesity, stress, and relationship conflict play into heart-disease outcomes. That is the same with suicide. It’s just that because it is a behavioral manifestation of a complex set of variables, it’s harder for people to get their head around.”</p><p>There’s also a reasonable fear of the damage that can be done by discussing it in the wrong way. <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/bioethics/nyspi/material/SuicideAndTheMedia.pdf">Research has shown</a> that portrayals of suicide in the media can lead to imitative attempts by others. The Netflix show <em>13 Reasons Why</em> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/13-reasons-why-controversy/525237/?utm_source=feed">came under fire in 2017</a> for its graphic and, some said, glamorizing depiction of a teen character’s suicide, and indeed, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/13-reasons-why-demonstrates-cultures-power/535518/?utm_source=feed">a study later found</a> that suicide-related searches on Google rose in the days after the show’s release. For this reason, journalists typically abide by <a href="https://afsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/recommendations.pdf">careful guidelines</a> when reporting on suicide, which include recommendations like avoiding detailed descriptions of methods, not oversimplifying the causes that lead to a person taking their life, and avoiding photos of grieving loved ones, so as not to sensationalize the death.</p><p>“People worry about talking about [suicide] because it provides people with a script,” says Bernice Pescosolido, a professor of sociology at Indiana University who studies suicide and the stigma of mental illness. But when people hear each other’s stories of struggling with mental illness, or with suicidal thoughts, it reduces stigma and helps people to know they’re not alone, she says. And social media provides an opportunity for these helpful conversations, as well as harmful ones.</p><p>“I think we’re definitely in a transition phase right now,” Moutier says, “where there’s both a huge progression of improvement, and a mixture of some of the old assumptions and judgements still floating around. I’m referring to blaming the person for being cowardly, or assuming that suicide is a sudden and unpredictable fluky moment of losing their head. That really goes against the science.”</p><p>This cultural transition may be awkward, because as stigma slowly recedes and people become more willing to have these conversations, that doesn’t mean they know <em>how</em> to have them. For example, Pescosolido says she sees among her students more openness to sharing their experiences with mental illness, but they still “don’t know how and when to disclose it.”</p><p>Resources like suicide hotlines are important tools, but they are not the only forums for people to talk about what they’re going through, and may not be attractive to everyone in need. On Friday, the day Anthony Bourdain died, many people on Twitter were emphasizing the importance of reaching out to loved ones who seem at risk for suicide, or simply those who are struggling. The model Chrissy Teigen wrote, “In my deepest, darkest postpartum depression, I would have personally never called a phone number.”</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">In my deepest, darkest post-partum depression, I would have personally never called a phone number. If John or my doctor never reached out, I would have never even known. It really can be a lonely hole. Watch the people you love and don’t be afraid to speak up.</p>
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1005113074968289280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Check on your strong friends.<br>
Check on your quiet friends.<br>
Check on your "happy" friends.<br>
Check on your creative friends.<br>
Check on each other.</p>
— lauren warren (@iamlaurenp) <a href="https://twitter.com/iamlaurenp/status/1005101354002440193?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Pescosolido has a theory, based on some of the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s late-19th-century writings on suicide. People are quick to blame loneliness and a lack of social integration for suicide, she says. “The other dimension that we tend to forget about is how much people guide you, and oversee what you do, and tell you when you screw up and help you right your path—the regulation that social networks accomplish in your life,” she says, wondering whether “the ability of your family, friends, or society to guide you is what’s been going away, not so much the lack of connectedness.”</p><p>Sometimes a restricting sort of politeness, the desire not to bother each other, can build walls between people, especially in a time when we’re hyperaware of how many other texts and emails and Facebook notifications our friends are probably getting. Pescosolido posits that society has come to focus on the rights of individuals, to the detriment of people’s obligations to each other. “I think that comes at a social cost,” she says. Formerly taboo subjects like suicide have become less off-limits as stigmas have eased, but these shifts take time.</p><p>“In the 1950s, you never told anybody you had cancer,” she says. “Many problems have gone through this, and we’ve made progress on others. Issues with the mind, and the brain, and personal relationships are the last frontier. They’re the last thing we need to learn how to talk about.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedTed S. Warren / AP A sign advising of the phone number for a suicide-prevention hotline is shown on the Aurora Bridge in Seattle.When Will People Get Better at Talking About Suicide?2018-06-09T07:00:00-04:002018-06-09T07:00:37-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-562466As suicide rates rise, and stigma recedes, many discussions and portrayals are still clumsy or hurtful.<p><em>Connection</em> is the watchword.</p><p>That’s what Facebook is about, if you haven’t heard. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/the-strangest-moments-from-the-zuckerberg-testimony/557672/?utm_source=feed">in testimony</a> before Congress in April, after tens of millions of Facebook users learned that their private data had been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html">compromised</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-in-three-paragraphs/556046/?utm_source=feed">shared</a> with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.</p><p>What Facebook is <em>not</em> about is data misuse. That, along with spam, fake news, and clickbait, are things that <em>happen</em> on Facebook, <a href="http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/a-close-read-of-facebooks-disingenuous-apology-ad.html">as a recent apology ad from the company put it</a>, but they’re not what Facebook is <em>about.</em> What does Facebook do? It connects. What is Facebook? <a href="http://observer.com/2018/04/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-defense-vox-interview-community/">A community</a>. What is Facebook for? It’s for friends.</p><p>Research shows that people become closer to each other <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1978.tb00599.x">through intimate self-disclosure</a>. But there’s only so much connecting social-media platforms can do if people are too concerned about privacy to use them for the full breadth and depth of human communication. Paradoxically, these tools that were built to bolster relationships may, by their very nature, be keeping people at a distance from each other.</p><p>I recently conducted a survey, trying to determine how much people censor themselves on social media and whether the Cambridge Analytica scandal has changed their behavior on Facebook and other platforms. I also shared my survey results with Sauvik Das, an assistant professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Sarita Schoenebeck, the director of the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan. They kindly performed basic analyses of some of the data.</p><p>This survey is not scientific—<em>The Atlantic </em>pushed it out to readers on Facebook and Twitter, in newsletters, and through our membership program, no doubt skewing the demographics of the sample. The 2,218 respondents were 82 percent white and largely based in the United States. Fifty-nine percent were female, 40 percent were male, and 1 percent were nonbinary. A variety of ages are represented, though on the whole the sample leans older.</p><p>Nonetheless, the results offer a glimpse at what people are and aren’t willing to share on social media, how much they trust different platforms, and what effect privacy concerns have on user behavior. I also did follow-up interviews with several people to get a more detailed view of their feelings about social-media privacy.</p><p>Overall, 78.8 percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the privacy of their information on social media, and 82.2 percent said they self-censor on social media. According to Das’s analysis, older people were more likely than younger people to report self-censoring because of privacy concerns, though the likelihood was 75 percent or above for all age groups. “Self-censorship,” for this survey, was defined as stopping yourself from posting something you might otherwise want to share, because of concerns about privacy.</p><figure><img alt="" height="276" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_rJFmCuExX-1/270495a28.png" width="656"></figure><script src="https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js"></script><script src="https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js"></script><figure><img alt="" height="194" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_S1SP1YNg7-1/ccd67856b.png" width="656"></figure><p>David Garvey, a 27-year-old sales director in Boston, has been self-censoring since long before Cambridge Analytica, after photos of him drinking in high school found their way to Facebook, where a friend’s mother saw them and alerted his headmaster.</p><p>“Right off the bat I ... understood that anything you post on there can be seen pretty much by anyone at any time,” Garvey says. “So I don’t really post anything at all. Anything that could be out there for public consumption, I try to manage very closely.” Garvey says he is “not at all” concerned about his privacy on social media, because he’s already so careful about what he posts.</p><p>Among survey participants, Facebook was by far the most used and the least trusted social network—57.9 percent of the platform’s users said they “mostly distrusted” Facebook or had “no trust” in it to keep their personal information private and secure. Every other platform—Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat—had a wider distribution of responses, and a larger portion of people saying they felt “neutral/unsure.” Even Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, was more trusted. A couple people who felt that way told me they did know Facebook owned Instagram, but just felt that the information shared on Instagram—pictures, mostly—was less exploitable.</p><div class="atlas-chart" data-height="449" data-id="r1sQ5_Nlm" data-width="640"><img alt="" src="https://www.theatlas.com/i/atlas_r1sQ5_Nlm.png" style="max-width: 100%;"></div><script src="https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js"></script><p>In an email, a Facebook spokesperson told me the company hasn’t seen “any meaningful impact” on user behavior in the past couple months, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March. “What we have seen is that people now care more about data privacy and understanding the controls and choices they have.” In response to that desire, the company has <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/privacy-shortcuts/">made privacy settings easier to find</a> and plans to develop a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/how-facebook-became-the-tech-company-people-love-to-hate/559418/?utm_source=feed">“Clear History”</a> <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/clear-history-2/">feature</a> that allows users to delete the data Facebook has accumulated on them from outside sources.</p><p>But some people do seem to be rethinking how—or if—they use Facebook post–Cambridge Analytica. In my survey, 99 percent of respondents said they were aware of the news—though of course, this survey was pushed out primarily to <em>Atlantic </em>readers, and <em>The Atlantic</em> closely covered the scandal. Of those, 41.9 percent said they changed their behavior on Facebook as a result of learning about the news, mostly by being more careful about what they posted. Das cautions, though, that “people say and do different things when it comes to privacy pretty often.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="189" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_BJoOfKHlQ2x/726f8c17d.png" width="656"></figure><figure><img alt="" height="300" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_Byp5mYrl72x/3317c9f0b.png" width="656"></figure><p>A small but not insignificant portion of people—9.6 percent—said they deleted or deactivated their Facebook account as a result of the news. Facebook declined to provide data on whether the average monthly number of people deactivating and deleting their accounts had changed since the Cambridge Analytica news broke, and their <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q1/Q1-2018-Press-Release.pdf">most recent earnings report</a> only accounts for the number of users as of March 2018.</p><p>Janice Riggs, a 57-year-old in Chicago who runs a style blog, deleted her Facebook account after hearing the Cambridge Analytica news. “It’s one more thing I can just get out of my life,” she says. “I don’t use it. I don’t trust them as far as I could pick them all up and toss them. So I closed mine; my husband closed his. I know two people in Chicago canceling is not going to really give them pause in the dead of night. At least for us, we put a tiny little mark in the sand of how we felt about it.” Riggs also notes that figuring out how to delete her Facebook account was difficult—she ended up googling instructions.</p><p>A smaller portion of people—25.6 percent—said they changed their behavior on other social-media platforms after Cambridge Analytica, mostly by being more careful, or posting less, or changing their privacy settings.</p><figure><img alt="" height="187" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_H1YB4Kre72x/22fb94148.png" width="656"></figure><figure><img alt="" height="300" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_HyuXBYBlX2x/b5a96cc7a.png" width="656"></figure><p>Cambridge Analytica aside, the survey respondents said that overall, the information they post on social media is less personal than it was five years ago. Sixty percent of people said they either post a little less or way less personal information, while 25.7 percent said it’s stayed the same.</p><figure><img alt="" height="340" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/06/atlas_B1Kb8KHl72x/e3901316f.png" width="656"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-struggles-to-stop-decline-in-original-sharing?shared=eeb2ca">In 2016, </a><em>The Information </em>reported that, on Facebook at least, original personal sharing (as opposed to posting memes or links) was on the decline. And another survey, <a href="https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-social-media/">done by the American Press Institute in 2015</a>, found that Millennials reported being more concerned about privacy than they had been in the past.</p><p>“I think people are starting to get more used to the idea that social media is part of their life forever,” Das says. He’s even noticed this in himself: He says he primarily shares professional updates or major personal news on Facebook, “whereas before I would share all kinds of dumb things.”</p><p>As social media becomes less novel and more like a utility, perhaps people are more aware that their private information is the cost of using social media. But some don’t seem to mind.</p><p>“If Facebook wants to use me as a data point to improve their overall algorithm, by all means do it,” Garvey says. “I think it’s going to be a net benefit to society. That data is valuable and I think there are insights to be gleaned from it that are more constructive than harmful.”</p><p>“Mark Zuckerberg, I think, is a genius with Facebook,” says Shirley O’Key, a 98-year-old retired teacher who lives in Sacramento, California. “He had admirable goals, he wanted to have the world communicate. I really believe that he sincerely wanted that. Then of course he’s hammered because they said he didn’t keep things private. Well, nothing is private. How stupid can we be?”</p><p>Perhaps it’s not that people are stupid, but that they’re stuck. My colleague Alexis Madrigal has posited that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/facebook-the-unstoppable/559301/?utm_source=feed">Facebook may be unstoppable</a>—too big, too central to too many people’s lives for any negative press to truly affect it. At the very least, it seems that in terms of necessity, Facebook is in a class of its own. The majority of Facebook users in my survey—68.6 percent—said that without Facebook their social life would suffer somewhere from “a little” to “greatly.” For every other social media platform, the majority of people said their social lives would suffer “not at all” without it.</p><div class="atlas-chart" data-height="449" data-id="HJIl5Kre7" data-width="640"><img alt="" src="https://www.theatlas.com/i/atlas_HJIl5Kre7.png" style="max-width: 100%;"></div><script src="https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js"></script><p>Regina Goodrich, a 26-year-old retail worker in Coral Springs, Florida, says she’s deactivated her Facebook account five times or so in the last five years. But she kept coming back. “I think it was mostly the fear of missing out on something,” she says. But she recently deleted it for good—not because of Cambridge Analytica, but because it was making her feel too anxious, she says. Although, “the privacy concern is definitely a reason why I won’t be making an account again.”</p><p>But the majority of people who answered my survey didn’t change their behavior on social media after Cambridge Analytica.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Taylor Moore, a 22-year-old in Chicago who works in digital marketing, says Facebook is her “primary social-media network,” and that she uses Facebook Messenger more than texting. “If I had to delete any app, I think Facebook would have the most impact,” she says. And while she says the Cambridge Analytica news felt like a “violation,” she says she hasn’t changed her behavior because of it.</p><p>“Cambridge Analytica is not the first time Facebook’s been in the news for privacy practices,” Schoenebeck says. “That’s been an ongoing news story for almost a decade now. Each time it’s happened, there’s a sense that, ‘No, but this one was the real one, and people are really gonna leave,’ but then people seem to not leave. It’s almost acting like a public utility, in the sense that people, especially adults, feel like they have to be on it. So I think you’re not going to see that people’s use of Facebook correlates with their trust of it. So many institutions and organizations have adopted it—workplaces, schools, community centers, churches—people will in fact miss out.”</p><p>While privacy violations may lead some people to opt out of some platforms altogether, the dominance of social media seems unlikely to change at a macro level. “It’s not enough to say we can just stop using these platforms because we can just go back to the old way of things,” Das says. “I think we can’t, because they’ve totally changed how we socialize, at least in this country.”</p><p>Rather, if we continue to rely on social media to do much of the heavy lifting of keeping in touch, then privacy violations that damage trust are likely to have a subtler chilling effect. People won’t abandon social media en masse; they’ll just be a little quieter, a little more careful, a little less personal. And social media won’t be a very good tool for real, authentic connection.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedJon Nazca / ReutersPeople Are Changing the Way They Use Social Media2018-06-07T07:30:00-04:002018-06-08T07:32:46-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-562154Posts are getting less personal—and privacy breaches like Cambridge Analytica could be partly to blame, an <em>Atlantic </em>survey finds<p>The dress is blue; tennis balls are yellow; and much like a glass can be both half-empty and half-full (because there are TWO HALVES), the audio clip is saying both “laurel” and “yanny” at the same time.</p><p>These are the molehills I have chosen to die on, because when it comes to viral illusions, it seems, you must choose a side. Enough of these divisive illusions have piled up now to make one wonder: How different <em>is</em> my reality from everyone else’s?</p><p>It all began in a simpler time—February 2015—on an ordinary Thursday evening when <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/catesish/help-am-i-going-insane-its-definitely-blue?utm_term=.jweVwkVvB3#.oiANEdNZOz">a photo of a dress posted on Tumblr got picked up by <em>BuzzFeed.</em></a> Was the dress white and gold, or blue and black? The question pitted brother against brother, friend against friend, caused celebrities to weigh in, and basically ground the internet to a halt. The dress was actually blue, but that hardly mattered. (And most people didn’t see it that way—in <em>BuzzFeed</em>’s original poll, 67 percent of people voted for white and gold, compared to 33 percent for blue and black.) What mattered was that the chasm between perception and reality had opened up, and we found ourselves teetering on the edge.</p><p>The Dress seemed like a fluke, a one-off moment of miraculous serendipity. Someone happened to take a photo of this specific dress just as the light was golden in that certain way that caused people to see different colors. And for a while, the internet rested. Or, well, it just fought about other things. Then more of these illusions started to appear. In 2016 there was <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/catesish/what-color-is-this-jacket?utm_term=.nlMNnzN6we#.amB4Z14glO">a jacket</a> that appeared to be different colors to different people. In 2017 there was <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/a12841521/what-color-is-this-freaking-shoe/">a shoe.</a></p><p>“I think The Dress made for a new format of virality and memes,” says Cates Holderness, a senior social-media strategist at <em>BuzzFeed</em>, and the author of the site’s original post about The Dress. “It’s one thing or the other, there’s a weird illusion in some way, and you’ve got to look or listen and decide your camp. ‘Oh, is this the new Dress?’ is something I hear every time one of these things happens.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>2018 has brought a bounty of these phenomena. This February, my colleague Marina Koren discovered <a href="https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/961700363131908096">a poll posted on Twitter</a> posing a seemingly simple question: What color is a tennis ball? Her <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/?utm_source=feed">subsequent investigation</a> revealed yet another nexus of fierce division over what our senses tell us about the world we live in. Some said green; <a href="http://time.com/5208361/roger-federer-tennis-ball-color/">Roger Federer said yellow</a>, and Marina concluded: “The color of a tennis ball is, and would remain, in the eye of the beholder.”</p><p>Now, it’s the ears of the beholders that have been divided. <a href="https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/996218489831473152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2018%2F05%2Fdont-rest-on-your-laurels%2F560483%2F&amp;tfw_site=theatlantic&amp;utm_source=feed">Earlier this week, an audio recording that</a> sounds to some like the person is saying “yanny” and sounds to others like “laurel” spurred another round of perceptual team-forming. (Even Bitmoji—the company that lets you create memes using an avatar of yourself—<a href="https://www.elitedaily.com/p/laurel-yanny-bitmojis-are-here-to-make-your-arguments-that-much-better-9116527">made special <em>yanny</em> and <em>laurel</em> stickers</a> for you to use in text arguments with your friends.) The man in the recording <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history/">was actually saying <em>laurel</em></a>, but again, that hardly matters.</p><p>Just a couple days later, the internet is at it again, having surfaced yet another bizarre auditory illusion that has quickly gone viral. This time it’s <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/8jxzee/you_can_hear_brainstorm_or_green_needle_based_on/">a video</a> of what seems to be a toy, which says ... something ... in a distorted, fuzzy voice. Listeners are largely able to make themselves hear either <em>brainstorm</em> or <em>green needle</em>, simply by thinking about one of those words before listening.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">You can hear "Brainstorm" or "Green Needle" based on whichever one you think about.<br><br>
Pure black magic. We're well past 'Yanny' and 'Laurel'! <a href="https://t.co/mgtss1lrtO">pic.twitter.com/mgtss1lrtO</a></p>
— Tomango (@tomangoUK) <a href="https://twitter.com/tomangoUK/status/997095118023942144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 17, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>Taken together, all these viral illusions illustrate that perception is an interpretive act—the inputs that go into our brains don’t always translate the same way for every individual. Most of the time, we’re all moving through the world together, assuming we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste it the same way. And it’s newly alarming every time it’s pointed out that we’re simply not.</p><p>Am I experiencing a hundred micro-<em>yanny</em>s and <em>laurel</em>s every day without knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind, unable to know for sure what is real outside of it. But he did say he thinks it’s more remarkable that people don’t get this confused over speech all the time.</p><p>“The kinds of ambiguities in the signal that you have in these kinds of illusions—they occur in lots of places in speech, and we don’t seem to notice them,” he said. Sure, you might mishear a word here or there in conversation, but for the most part the sonic variability of speech doesn’t keep us from understanding each other.</p><p>I had just sent Toscano the <em>brainstorm</em>/<em>green needle</em> video before we talked, and he gave me his initial impression of what might be going on there. “Expectation plays a big role in speech perception,” he said. His lab will often create micro-versions of these kind of illusions for their research—putting an ambiguous sound in front of “ark,” for example, such that it might sound like “bark” or “park.” Then, if people are primed with images of a dog, say, they’ll be more likely to interpret it as “bark.”</p><p>In this case, “the sounds that make up <em>brainstorm</em>, and the sounds that make up <em>green needle</em>, there’s actually a lot of similarities between them,” Toscano says. “So my guess is that this recording is just right that it sits right on the edge between some of those speech sounds. And so that allows you to use your expectation to change what you hear.” The <em>yanny</em>/<em>laurel</em> recording works similarly—my colleague <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/dont-rest-on-your-laurels/560483/?utm_source=feed">Rachel Gutman wrote a great explanation of the recording’s linguistics.</a></p><p>After we got off the phone, Toscano emailed me yet another example: a YouTube video of a man just shouting the same sound over and over again, which sounds alternately like <em>bill</em>, <em>bale</em>, <em>pail</em>, or <em>mayo</em> as images of famous Bills (Clinton, etc.), a bale of hay, pails, and jars of mayo flash on screen. This is my favorite one yet because it’s a dirtbag auditory illusion—dingy, ridiculous, and a little annoying. But it sure grabs your attention.</p><p><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KiuO_Z2_AD4?rel=0" width="560"></iframe></p><p>Part of the reason these catch on is because it’s both fun and existentially harrowing to watch (or hear) the fabric of your assumed reality warp and whirl. “We would think that perception is objective,” says Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781451686579?aff=sfjbb">Contagious: Why Things Catch On</a>.</em> If you see a white-and-gold dress, there’s no reason to think your eyes are lying to you. When enough people swear up and down they see something else, “we find it impossible. We feel like people must be playing a joke on us,” he says.</p><p>So that’s partly why. But these things are also likely to catch on because they allow people to get partisan over something that doesn’t really matter. “We love being grouped up, even if our group is based on a totally specious reason,” Berger says (<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23teamlaurel&amp;src=typd">#TeamLaurel</a>; <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23teamyanny&amp;src=typd">#TeamYanny</a>).</p><p>“You’re on Twitter, and you see teams have been chosen,” says David Berreby, the author of <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316090308">Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind.</a> </em>“It’s not like religion or philosophy where you have to consciously think about where you stand; this is automatic, it’s involuntary. You either hear one thing or the other. There are teams and one of them is your team.”</p><p>And these teams get pared down and simplified as the memes spread. For example, I saw some people saying they heard the <em>yanny</em>/<em>laurel</em> recording as <em>Gary</em> or <em>yearly</em>. But that didn’t fit in the fun binary. Likewise, Holderness says during The Dress’s heyday, some people were telling her they saw it as blue and bronze—“and they got shouted over.”</p><p>In some sense it’s disappointing, that even when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/science/the-science-behind-the-dress-color.html">the scientists</a> start <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2018/3/22/17151100/tennis-ball-green-yellow-color-debate-science">weighing in</a> (as they always do) on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/science/yanny-laurel.html">how these illusions work</a>, people aren’t sharing them as a way of bonding with others over how the human brain is bizarre and full of mysteries and how we can’t take for granted that even our most basic perceptions of the world are correct, but in order to stir the pot and yell about being right.</p><p>But on the other hand: “There’s so much fighting on the internet, and so many important things that people fight about on the internet,” Holderness says. “Having something lighthearted we can fight about is important. I think that’s why these types of things go viral.”</p><p>“What’s nice about this is it’s a safe disagreement,” Berger says. “This isn’t going to hurt anybody’s feelings.”</p><p>These illusions seem almost guaranteed to go viral, because they allow people to do two of their favorite things: argue and choose sides. Plus, they’re truly novel and surprising, while also fitting into a meme category that, thanks to The Dress, we now recognize as familiar.</p><p>And unlike so much other viral content, which at this point often feels like it’s been assembly-lined in a cold, unfeeling, stainless-steel meme factory, these seem like the sort of phenomena you can only stumble on by happenstance. If Toscano were to share one of the audio illusions he creates in his lab for research purposes, it likely wouldn’t have the same effect. “Why did The Dress take off when there are many other illusions in vision that don’t spread all over the internet by wildfire?” he muses. “It just seemed like some random photograph of a dress. When people see an illusion we create in a lab, we take all the fun out of it, in a way.”</p><p>But amidst all that serendipitous fun and name-calling, viral illusions poke at a very real anxiety. “It’s not really about people being split into teams,” Berreby says. “It’s not ‘us versus them,’ it’s: ‘Oh, “us” is not what I thought “us” was,’ and that’s disturbing.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedBitmoji / Shutterstock / The AtlanticWhat's Up With All These Viral Illusions?2018-05-18T11:09:47-04:002018-05-18T11:37:39-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-560693From The Dress to tennis-ball colors to Yanny vs. Laurel, the internet keeps surfacing these places where our perceptions diverge.<p>As I type these words, my nails are 10 small silver mirrors, reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights as I move my fingers across my keyboard. I learned about these so-called chrome nails from <em>The Atlantic’s </em> fashionable deputy web editor Swati Sharma, and shortly thereafter, she and I went and got manicures so I could see the process in action. The mirror effect was created with a special powder that a nail technician, as they’re referred to in the industry, rubbed onto a layer of polish with a tiny sponge. It was mesmerizing, and a little mystifying. How did the glitter powder transform into a solid, shiny surface?</p><p>We have the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuCVWLxT1SU">red-carpet mani cam</a> to thank, at least partially, for the surge in popularity of nail art, says Beth Livesay, the executive editor of <em>Nails</em> magazine. When celebrities started treating their nails as canvases for miniature art, the trend caught on with the public, too. But lately, the nail-art galleries of Pinterest and Instagram have been displaying not just polish hand-paintings, but futuristic-looking effects like <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/explore/chrome-nails/">chromes</a>, <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=cat%20eye%20%20nails&amp;rs=typed">cat’s eyes</a>, and <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=holographic%20nails&amp;rs=typed">holographic rainbow nails</a>.</p><p>“Right now, the trends are the effects,” Livesay says. “The bar’s been raised universally for nail art.”</p><p>I spoke with a couple cosmetic chemists to understand the science behind turning normal human nails into mirrors, or gemstones, or <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=mermaid%20nails&amp;rs=typed&amp;term_meta%5B%5D=mermaid%7Ctyped&amp;term_meta%5B%5D=nails%7Ctyped">shimmering fish scales</a>. They explained the basic chemical processes behind polishes and effects. (I can’t, however, confirm the exact ingredients of many specific brands’ products. I reached out to OPI, Orly, Creative Nail Design, and Whats Up Nails—all of which declined to be interviewed or did not return requests for comment.)</p><p>It starts with understanding how regular nail polish works, and how the longer-lasting “gel” manicures are different. Regular polish, or “lacquer” as some in the industry call it, is made of <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/86/8632sci2.html">polymers—long chain molecules that are good at forming strong structures—dissolved in solvents</a>. Once the polish is painted on, the solvents evaporate, leaving behind the film formed by the polymers (and the pigment that gives it color). Lacquers also often include other resins and plasticizers to help the polish adhere to the nail, and to make it more flexible. To remove it, you apply a solvent in the form of nail-polish remover (typically containing acetone or ethyl acetate), and the lacquer dissolves.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>“It’s very much like hair spray,” says Doug Schoon, the president of Schoon Scientific and a former chief scientist at a commercial nail-polish company. “You spray it on your hair, the solvent evaporates off, and it leaves a coating that holds the hair in place. Nail polish is a little more sophisticated than hair spray, because hair spray just has to do one thing, and really doesn’t last that long, whereas nail polish has to be shiny, adhere to the nail plate, be resistant to scratching and dings, hold the color and not fade, and come off easily when you want it.”</p><p>Gels—which Livesay says also helped fuel the start of the nail-art craze—are longer-lasting substances that are mostly available in salons, and which harden under UV or LED light. Whereas the film-forming polymers are already mixed into your standard nail lacquer, “in the case of artificial nail coatings, they’re actually making the polymer on the nail,” Schoon says. “The gels are oligomers and monomers, which are snippets of polymers, and then when the UV light hits [the gel], it causes these snippets to all join together and assemble like a jigsaw puzzle.”</p><p>What happens under the lamp is a free-radical reaction, “which sounds really rebellious,” says Jim McConnell, a chemist and the cofounder of Light Elegance, a nail-product company. The light causes a compound in the gel to release a very reactive molecule known as a free radical, which then attacks and opens up bonds within the monomers and oligomers. Those bonds are then free to re-form with adjacent molecules into a more intricate chain, creating the hard polymer that makes the gel manicure so durable and long-lasting.</p><p>Confusingly, though, a lot of different products are called “gels.” “It’s a struggle constantly to get the right terminology in place,” Livesay says. “A lot of times people don’t know what they’re asking for.”</p><p>There are hard gels, which are the most durable, and can only be removed by filing them off. These are more popular in Europe, according to McConnell. Soft gels are similar, but slightly less durable and easier to remove. Then there are gel polishes, which are more likely to be what the average American will encounter if they just walk into a salon and ask for a “gel manicure.” The composition of these can vary depending on the brand—some are soft gels mixed with solvent; some are gels mixed with lacquer. Both can be removed with acetone.</p><p>(A word of caution from Schoon: With any sort of gel, a technician should never file it off all the way down to your natural nail. “This is like putting a bunch of glue on your roof and then taking a crow bar and scraping the glue off. You're going to pull shingles up, too.”)</p><p>Gel manicures form the base for a lot of the visual effects that have populated social media of late. “Effect powders” are responsible for the chrome look, as well as the holographic nails. These powders, McConnell says, all work in pretty much the same way, but are just made with different materials. After a nail technician paints on a layer of gel color, they cover it in a special top coat, and cure it under a lamp just long enough for it to be barely sticky. Then they dip the little sponge in one of these powders, and rub it in.</p><p>For chrome nails, that powder is made of glass, metal, and pigment. “There’s no chrome in it,” McConnell says. “That would be completely illegal, because chrome is a heavy metal and the FDA would be down our throats about it. It’s more of a mirror nail.” And much like with a real mirror, the reflective effect is created when a metal—silver, in this case—is sandwiched between a base layer of paint (or polish in this case) and a clear protective layer on top (glass for a mirror; a clear, glossy polish for the chrome nails).</p><p>The powder doesn’t become a solid, even though it looks like it does; it’s just extremely fine and fills in extremely well. “If you could magnify it really, really large, you could see there’s spaces between each of the particles,” Schoon says, “but you can’t see it with your eye, because they’re too tiny.”</p><p>Different effects can be achieved with different pigments. Light Elegance has a bunch of different Pretty Powders, some of which give a chrome effect, some of which are pearly—that comes from mica coated with pigment, McConnell says—and some of which are holographic. The holographic effect (also sometimes called mermaid nail) is made with extremely fine bits of holographic polyester. This look can also be achieved, Schoon says, with a thin polyester film, “like the ribbons they wrap presents in at Christmastime.” But Light Elegance, at least, sells that polyester in a powder form that can be rubbed on the same as a chrome.</p><p>Tiny particles are also responsible for the cat’s-eye effect—but they’re incorporated into the polish itself, rather than spread on top as a powder. A polish formulated with iron oxide is painted onto the nail, and then the technician will hold a magnet over it. “It’s like the old Etch a Sketches,” Schoon says. “All the iron particles will line up, carry the pigments with them, and create a special effect.” The rearranging leaves a lighter stripe in the polish, which looks like the band of light in a cat’s-eye gemstone.</p><p>“Dip powder” manicures are yet another trend, and they’re exactly what they sound like: The color is applied by dipping the finger into a little pot of acrylic powder. It sticks because the base coat is basically cosmetic-grade superglue. Then you can repeat the process for as many layers of color as you want, and seal with a topcoat.</p><p>“All the brands are coming out with [dip powder] now,” Livesay says—but these products <a href="http://www.nailsmag.com/article/115847/acrylic-dip-systems-make-a-comeback?force-desktop-view=1">have been around since the 1980s</a>. None of this chemistry, Schoon and McConnell stress, is especially new. Effect powders are the newest, having hit the market a couple years ago, they say, but Schoon characterizes all these effects as just creative uses of old pigments and ingredients.</p><p>And these effects are particularly social-media friendly. Not only do they look cool when they’re done, but the process of applying a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zFrU7clMA8">chrome powder</a> or a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ_qCDWNvXU">dip powder</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op7jn32ZU-A">holding the magnet to a cat’s-eye polish</a> is fun to watch, and makes for a good YouTube or Instagram video.</p><p>“It’s a very soothing process to watch,” Livesay says. “You know how on Instagram, it recommends videos for you, and ‘oddly satisfying’ is one of the [hashtags]? It’s like people frosting a cake or something like that? I think it’s the same thing. I think it seeps into where our culture is at right now: It’s quick, it’s kind of mindless, but also it’s very comforting.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedElena Grama / Shutterstock / The AtlanticWhat Fresh Gel Is This?2018-04-16T13:56:00-04:002018-04-17T10:10:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-558113The chemistry of gel manicures, chrome nails, and other nail-art trends<p>The advice column as we know it today started with a deception. In <em>The </em><i>Athenian Mercury</i>, a London magazine that ran from 1690 to 1697, the Athenian Society—supposedly a group of 30-some experts across many fields—answered anonymous reader questions. They replied to all sorts of queries, as Jessica Weisberg recounts in her new book <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781568585345"><i>Asking for a Friend</i></a>: “Why alcohol killed erections and made people slur, why horse excrement was square, if people born with missing body parts were also missing part of their soul, and if the sun was made of fire.”</p><p>In actuality, the Athenian Society was just a handful of men—a publisher named John Dunton, his two brothers-in-law, and a man who “they were 50 percent sure was a doctor,” Weisberg says.</p><p>But dubious expertise has never stopped anyone from giving advice. And since the days of the <i>Mercury, </i>people have continued to gobble up guidance from wherever it is on offer. Americans, especially, are enamored with advice, Weisberg writes, whether that comes in the classic form of a column like Dear Abby, from a self-help book like Dale Carnegie’s <i>How to Win Friends and Influence People</i>, or from the anonymous masses on Quora or Reddit.</p><p>Weisberg takes a wide sample of advice-givers across time and profiles each of them in-depth: from Benjamin Franklin to Miss Manners to Joan Quigley<a href="#Correction">*</a>, the astrologer who advised Nancy Reagan. She considers the book a work of “emotional history.” Advice both shapes and reflects the society it exists in; she believes diving into particulars of the advice given across centuries (mostly) in the United States offers a unique perspective on Americans’ concerns and values.</p><p>I spoke with Weisberg over the phone about many of these issues. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.</p><hr><p><b>Julie Beck: </b>You write that “America is unique in its hankering for advice.” When did that hunger start, and why do you think it’s a particularly American craving?</p><p><b>Jessica Weisberg: </b>It started right away. One of the very first best sellers in America was an etiquette book that was written by a British statesman. It was by a guy named Lord Chesterfield, and it wasn’t intended as an etiquette book. Lord Chesterfield had a son who was born out of wedlock, and they didn’t have that much contact. So Chesterfield just wrote his son a lot of letters to sort of try to make up for this lack of human contact. The letters had been compiled without his knowledge by his son’s widow.</p><p>In his letters, he just says: Be super strategic, never say how you feel, imitate people, never be authentic. People were just up in arms about it, reading it obsessively and arguing about it. And then Benjamin Franklin came shortly after that with <em>Poor Richard’s Almanack</em>, which, again, was an advice book.</p><p>This was a time when everything was changing and people were seeking to create a society and a culture with different values and standards than what had come before. People were thinking about these things; George Washington wrote about manners. It felt like a very essential part of our culture from very early on.</p><p>As time has gone on, the obsession with advice has taken a lot of different forms, and I think it really reflects the cultural tendency toward optimism. The American dream is a dream, but it really does loom large in a lot of people’s imaginations.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Lord Chesterfield was British, and a lot of American society was rebelling against Britain at that time. Were people all super against it, or were there some people who were really compelled by those old British ethics and manners?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>There was definitely a tension. I think a lot of people liked it, not necessarily because of the content of the advice, but because it was good reading—with a lot about meeting fancy people all around Europe. The repulsion to it was just this idea that people shouldn’t be authentic. John Adams was very upset about this idea that people would say something that didn’t express what they actually felt. That didn’t reflect this new American ethos that he wanted to create.</p><p>But on the other side, Lord Chesterfield was really nervous about his son fitting in. He’s like: “You should be respectful of everybody; you should always take on the character of the situation you’re in.” If you think about that, there’s something very democratic about that advice. To be adaptable and be comfortable in all social settings. There is something kind of American about that as well.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>The book is organized into these chapter-length profiles of different advice columnists, or just advice-givers. When you look at the broad sweep of them, how has advice-giving in America evolved over time?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>Well, first of all, the early advice-givers in America are all white, male, and straight. Over time you see that changing some. Definitely, you see more women doing it in the 20th century. And today, even though the big national perches are still largely occupied by white cisgendered people, there are more opportunities for other people as our culture changes.</p><p>And how much vulnerability the advice-givers are giving of themselves—that changes a lot over time. Like, Benjamin Franklin is not admitting his own struggles with fidelity. Whereas you read later advice-givers and they’re talking about their own challenges with their marriages. Now, we don’t trust people unless they admit to their own mistakes, at least a little bit. Whereas there was a sense of objectivity and authority that advice-givers from many years ago tried to present.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>It seems like now we’re in an era of preferring relatability in our advice.</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>There’s still that tension. I think advice-givers still need to present both qualities. I just think vulnerability is the more salable quality, more than it used to be, and more than expertise at this point.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>What does that say about what we are actually looking for from advice? It seems like if we wanted the right answer to our question, we’d turn to experts. So is it more that we’re looking to <i>feel </i>like something is right, which is kind of a squishier thing?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>Throughout time, when people are looking for advice, they’re really looking for someone to be vulnerable with. I think that’s why, even in the earliest days of advice-giving, it was mostly anonymous. People are just creating this space to be vulnerable. And anonymity is the technology for it. The internet allows for that [even more], there’s a certain level of distancing in our communications online and I think this privileging of vulnerability feeds into that as well.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>So we want this space to be vulnerable. Is it maybe less about getting the right answer and more about being reassured that what we already think and do is normal, or at least acceptable?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>I think so. I think when people are looking at advice they’re often looking for affirmation. In advice before the internet, advice columns sort of functioned as a Reddit channel. It was a way for people to chime in and have an anonymized community where they can share their deepest secrets, maybe get some feedback on it and hopefully feel affirmed in their choices.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>I want to talk about another tension, which is the community versus the individual. Whether you privilege community over yourself, or be true to yourself and who cares what everyone else thinks—has that changed over time?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>Early advice is so much more concerned with how other people perceive you and contemporary advice is much more individually oriented. That reflects a change in our culture. But I think people certainly still crave affirmation from their community. I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive, but it’s interesting what people were preaching when. They were preaching cultural acceptance, and societal acceptance, and how to make your boss happy, in earlier generations. And now people are saying, focus on you. But I know I as an individual I certainly crave both, and I think most people do.</p><p>Most advice-givers, the ones that I profiled, define their job as an essentially centrist position—trying to find a balance between the individual and the society she is in. I think advice-givers for that reason are associated with social conservatism. This idea that there’s a right way to behave. And I sort of bristled at that.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Like Miss Manners?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>Yeah, like who are you to tell me how I should act? The idea of norms can be oppressive. But I also talked to Miss Manners and she said there <i>should</i> be norms because bigotry is unacceptable. And norms do allow us to live in a more peaceful society. There are certainly situations in which I appreciate norms.</p><p>I wrote this book largely during the presidential election and the early moments of the Trump administration. And I thought about my subjects really differently because of that. Because I was seeing a lot more public bigoted behavior, and that seemed unacceptable to me. [Advice columnists] are people who wanted to prevent that. That position comes with a certain kind of centrism, but also with a certain kind of idealism. With the idea that we should all behave respectfully toward each other.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>That leads into the last tension I wanted to talk about. You named two chapters after it: Politeness versus honesty. How do you think advice columnists have typically answered that question? Has it changed over time?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>I started that idea with Lord Chesterfield, because he believed that politeness was far more important than honesty or authenticity. There was no comparison in his mind. And the second chapter is about Miss Manners, and she kind of feels the same way. But what’s interesting is that Miss Manners comes from a long line of labor historians, and sees politeness as a way of respecting the dignity of human labor, and as really necessary for a democracy to work.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>I see a lot of modern advice columns saying that if you’re being overly polite to people and you’re not really telling them what you really feel and think, then that’s damaging in its own way. That the best thing is always to be honest.</p><p><b>Weisberg </b>From a personal point of view, it’s a struggle to censor yourself, but I’ve been at many family occasions where I’ve done that for the sake of keeping the peace. I prefer to be honest, and sometimes that preference overrides my care for the tension in the room. Then there are times when I feel like avoiding the tension in the room should take priority. And often that is a selfish decision. I want to avoid conflict.</p><p>That touches on that earlier tension you mentioned. Who is advice for? Is it for the individual seeking it or is it for the society she lives in?</p><p><b>Beck: </b>What do you think? Who is it for?</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p><b>Weisberg: </b>I think it depends on the individual advice-giver. Benjamin Franklin is definitely for the society he lived in. Miss Manners is often for the society she lives in. Martha Beck, who’s a life coach, is all about the individual. I tried to do a range in the book. But I think what I found really interesting about these people as a class of individuals is they were trying to navigate that tension in a really unique way, in a way I don’t feel like any other profession does as explicitly.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>So is it better to be honest or be polite?</p><p><b>Weisberg: </b>Personally? I would say honest. Because for all that Miss Manners says about politeness being good for democracy, I think honesty is really important for democracy, too. Nothing changes unless you state your point of view, and state it honestly and state it courageously. I think it is really important both for the individual and for the society she lives in to be honest. I just wish everyone could be honest with consideration for the people they’re being honest with. And that’s hard. That's really hard.</p><hr><p><em><small><a id="Correction" name="Correction">* </a>This piece originally misidentified Nancy Reagan's astrologer as Judith Martin. Martin writes the Miss Manners column; the astrologer's name is Joan Quigley. We regret the error.</small></em></p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedCharles Paillasson / GettyIs It Better to Be Polite or Honest?2018-04-10T12:06:00-04:002018-04-11T09:12:09-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-557624How centuries of advice columns have answered this and other questions.<p>It’s a coincidence that Penny, the heroine of Mary H.K. Choi’s young-adult novel <i><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781534408968">Emergency Contact</a>,</i> happens to be passing by as Sam, her local barista, is having his first panic attack. She gives him a ride, and her number, and tells him to text her when he gets home. He jokes that she’s his “emergency contact.”</p><p>Even though their relationship starts with an actual emergency, as the book progresses, being emergency contacts starts to mean that they are each other’s default sounding board for the random stream-of-consciousness thoughts that cry out to be shared, even though they don’t <i>need </i>to be. Sam texts Penny asking for fashion advice; Penny texts Sam about how much she hates maraschino cherries. For the bulk of the book, Penny and Sam are not physically present with each other, but their relationship is built with the bricks of life’s minutiae, constructed line by line within the confines of their phones.</p><p><i>Emergency Contact </i>is a book about how relationships that begin as a collection of pixels can become capital-R Real—in the <i>Velveteen Rabbit </i>sense. It’s also about the vague and slippery rules of communication in the digital age that both help and hurt those relationships. I spoke with Choi—a journalist who’s written for a variety of outlets (including <i><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/mary-hk-choi/?utm_source=feed">The Atlantic</a></i>)—about what those rules are, how we pretend to know them when we really don’t, and how she managed to write texts for a pair of young adults without sounding like an out-of-touch old person.</p><hr><p><b>Julie Beck: </b><i>Emergency Contact</i> reminded me of the <i>Wired</i> article you did in 2016 where you <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/08/how-teens-use-social-media/">embedded with different teens</a> around the country to learn about their social-media habits. Was that the genesis of the idea?</p><p><b>Mary H.K. Choi: </b>It wasn’t the genesis. <i>Emergency Contact,</i> as far as it being a love story between these two people, was already a thing. But when I was reporting out that <i>Wired</i> story, I was thinking about what it meant to be able to imprint on someone via phone—how real that is and how intimate it is. With texting, it’s almost as if it’s a confessional. You end up divulging so much more than you would if you were staring into someone’s eyes.</p><p>Sam has a moment where he’s revealing how he comes from zero money, and he’s so relieved that he can’t see judgment in Penny’s eyes. Those always perceptible but incalculable and fleeting micro-expressions where you can read that someone pities you or that they’re introducing some distance. That aspect of it not being there, I thought was interesting.</p><p>The other thing was that I was in the process of falling headlong into a relationship with someone long distance. It had been so long since I’d felt that kind of excitement. We were in our 30s, but we were just giddy. I’ve never tapped in my phone so long that my battery completely ran out, before this relationship.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>You need to get one of those cases that has the charger.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>No, but girl, I’m talking about from sunup to night, locked and loaded with a Mophie case with a full charge. It felt like dry heaving, I was so spent by the end of it.</p><p>The layer that no one wants to speak of is that there is always a threat of how staggeringly disappointing it could be when you meet in person. That’s a tension that underwrites all of it. So that, too, was obviously a really big part of the book. You worry if you’re on your phone just making promises that your actual self can never cash. That’s scary.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Was there any particular thing you noticed about how you were communicating with this person, or how the teens that you were spending time with communicated, that crystallized for you what you wanted this book to be?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>The thing that really did directly inform this book, from that <i>Wired</i> article, was how much pressure there is. Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented. But there’s this all-consuming worry for everything from climate change to unemployment to war. And they feel all of it, because of the immediacy of information in the 24-hour news cycle. I liken it to Spider-Man or any of these super humans who also are in high school, where it’s like: Save the world! But also math homework!</p><p>They’re all lonely, there’s so much noise, and I wanted to focus on a story that was about being able to find your signal in all the noise. The notion of this “emergency contact” is: Do you have someone who is holding you down? Do you know where to go if you’re feeling bad? I keep likening it to assigning yourself a godparent of your choosing.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>I have this friend who I Gchat with all day every day, for probably seven or eight years now. It’s just very stream of consciousness during the day. But if almost anybody else were to contact me that much, I’d probably be annoyed. It seems like a unique sort of relationship, the one that’s very constant and very intimate but almost entirely digital. This friend I don’t see very much in person. I’m interested in the nature of that unique kind of relationship.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>There’s so much solace in just ... crap. The effluvia of life, where it’s like: “Hey what did you eat for lunch?” “God, what do <i>I</i> want for lunch?” The people who can answer the seemingly rhetorical question of “What do <i>I</i> want to eat?”—those are the special people. They should get a gold star, they should be recognized.</p><p>Were Penny and Sam to never culminate in their first date on the last page, if that hadn’t happened, there is still a great beauty and poetry in their relationship which I don’t think people should be quick to dismiss. Because that’s incredibly valuable and rich. And not at all compromised by how many zeroes and ones comprise the framework of it.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>When I was a kid, I remember reading young-adult books that were written in epistolary email format, and I’ve seen some that are written entirely as texts or instant messages. I’m not going to name names, but some of them were truly awful. Like: “OMG U—letter U—won’t believe what Chad said in math class!” Just a parody of what old people think teens sound like. And yours feels very natural. How did you think about what kind of tone you wanted for Penny and Sam’s texts?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Us olds are so corny. Teens are otherized extensively, exhaustively. Spending time with real teens proved, as it usually does, that they’re such regular people. They have all the same insecurities and complicated feelings and awareness of where their understanding stalls out and how that scares them.</p><p>So I didn’t want that whole, “Oh my gah, na na na.” I really wanted it to feel like a conversation. If you do lean on text to do the heavy lifting in terms of creating a safe and intimate space for them, it had to not feel like text. I liken it to eating Doritos, where there is no satiation. You keep forgetting with each triangle you’ve ingested that you’ve had a Dorito. They are divulging things that are uncomfortable to them. And I didn’t want anything to bring you out of that.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p><b>Beck: </b>There’s a super interesting paradox about texting that I’ve been thinking about lately. The medium creates a lot of opportunities for anxiety, like if someone isn’t getting back to you fast enough, or if you’re watching that little “dot dot dot” ripple or whatever—but at the same time we <i>prefer </i>to communicate this way. Americans text more than they call, and texting is the primary form of communication for most people, especially younger generations. Why do you think that is?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Texting is incredibly anxiety-laden. But I know people who will have a full-blown panic attack if you call them. I’m one of those nightmare humans where the little mailbox has an ellipsis on it because I have 1000 unread emails. So texting is the most immediate yet least anxious of all the incredibly anxious ways that we talk to each other.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>It seems like we’re willing to trade that anxiety for a sense of control over the interaction. It feels easier to manage relationships asynchronously, or from a distance. Penny and Sam, for example, do feel more comfortable with each other in text format, at least at first. Do you think that’s because they feel more in control of what they’re saying that way?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>For sure. But the one incredibly important distinction that they make very early on—and I do think this is the bedrock of their mutual trust—is that they always text back when they want to. It just sucks when you’re texting someone and for some reason every time you text them there’s a four-hour lag. Of course, sometimes you’re not going to be able to hit the other one back immediately. But for these guys, not only is it incredibly even in terms of who prompts the conversation, there is such a haphazardness to when they hit each other back that feels sincere. That, to me, is the greatest gift you can give to a texting person.</p><p>When you start thinking about response times—or “Ellipsis, silence, ellipsis, silence, ellipsis, silence”—you just want to die. And probably the worst is a read receipt, and then silence.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Leaving read receipts on is a questionable choice.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Yeah, it’s like a sociopath. Why would you do that to people?</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Part of the problem is you don’t know the degree to which it’s a red flag or just someone who’s not technologically inclined and doesn’t know all the complicated rules.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Penny is so trusting with such a tiny social circle that she has wallpaper push notifications for her texts. That’s insane to me.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Where the full text appears on the lock screen, as opposed to saying “Message from so-and-so”?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Yeah.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Oh, mine definitely come up on the screen.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>I feel like that means you’re a good person. A friend of mine recently got married. His messages come up on the screen, and I was like: “Wow that surprises me, I thought I knew you.” And he was like: “No one shady is texting me. It might be a work thing, but who’s gonna see it but my wife and my squalling baby? I’ve never felt freer.” I think that’s really beautiful.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>I feel like I have slightly less beautiful motivations. I can’t stand the little red bubble that says one unread text, so I have to read it. But then I don’t always reply right away and I forget. So if I can just read it on the main screen, I don’t have to go into the app and open it.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Yeah, not me, I have to bank everything, otherwise, there’s too many tabs open in my brain. I’ll just be a pinwheel of death, if things come to me as they come to me.</p><p>Also just, existentially, why are we like this?</p><p><b>Beck: </b>I don’t know.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>This can’t actually be what we’re calling stasis. This can’t be our neutral setting. This is too crazy.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>But it is our neutral setting.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>It is now. And it burns. But it’s also fine. I keep picturing the dog in the hat in the burning house: <a href="http://gunshowcomic.com/648">This is fine.</a></p><p><b>Beck:</b> He is our mascot for this age. It’s strange—texting really has become part of the fabric of our lives. But at the same time, it’s also a space apart from that. It’s a regular part of Penny and Sam’s lives. But they still draw a distinction between phonespace and meatspace, as you call it. Sam at one point even says that he wouldn’t know what to do if Penny just came out of his phone. Because she’s contained there.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>You never feel meatspace as hardcore as high school. There are so many indicators of hierarchies and pecking orders, and so there’s this system to meatspace in high school. With college it’s loosey goosier. Except for the fact that popularity definitely does persist throughout our lives. It’s why celebrity is a thing. Granted, Sam is older than Penny is, but he’s more popular and it’s kind of empirical. Penny feels like their relationship couldn’t even exist in meatspace, because it’s so contrary to the natural order of the universe. The interface is the great equalizer. Texting does become a sort of neutral safe space.</p><p>I wanted to prove that the relationships you forge in these beaded curtains of DMs and texts and stuff aren’t in your imagination, and that being gaslit into believing that somehow isn’t real is unfair. I want to make the argument that it’s all real life.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>What it seems like to me is adding or removing layers of context. In the book, every time Penny and Sam have some kind of new communication, moving from texting to phone calls or seeing each other in person, they call it “escalating.” You wouldn’t have as many levels to escalate up through in the past because it was only phone or in person and that’s it. Now that we do have all these options for how to communicate with people, do you think there’s a more complex etiquette for how to escalate through these levels?</p><p><b>Choi: </b>Of course. The thing that’s tricky and slippery about it is that while it’s subjective, we somehow can’t talk about it. The thing that really sucks, and this is something I talked to the teens about, is this staring match of refusing to be the one to ask a question. It’s this word, that they and we use a lot, which is “awkward.” You don’t want to be the awkward one. We have all these conversations about consent and stuff but it’s still really, deeply uncool not to know the rules. So I think we’re all going around pretending we know the rules. There are a lot of intricacies now to whatever we’re calling courtship, or even friendship. I think it’s sad when people can’t talk about it.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>It also seems like, in a weird way, we’ve grown more polite by adding all these different rules and different mediums. No one wants to put an obligation on someone else. You’re like, “Oh I won’t call them because it’s so rude of me to want my friend to carve out 15 minutes to talk to me.” So you text instead. And it’s kind of sad.</p><p><b>Choi: </b>It always reminds me of the <i>Looney Tunes </i>[gophers]. You know how they’re standing on either side of a little doorway and prompting the other one to go in first? They keep being like “No, no, after <i>you</i>,” and it’s this politeness reverb that never ends. I feel like if I could eliminate the preamble to correspondence that accompanies every layer of the interface I would save countless hours a week.</p><p>In fact, I recently started doing phone calls and actually putting my foot down about it. Insisting that we do 10-to-15-minute phone calls instead of playing this rigmarole of email games, because I just can’t take it anymore.</p><p>This isn’t something I learned until I was much older, but relying on someone else breeds a kind of intimacy. There is so much focus on being self-sufficient and it makes it very difficult to ask for things. I’ve been crippled by this notion of high-functioning self-sufficiency. And I see it a lot in younger girls. Asking for help brings people closer in a way that I suspected but didn’t actually put into practice. And you can ask for that to be delivered to you in meatspace, or in any realm that you so see fit. I think that’s a really important way to know yourself: to know how you would like your information and how you would like your intimacies delivered to you, and to be able to ask for them.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedAaron Richter / Emojipedia / Katie Martin / The AtlanticHow to Fall in Love Over Text2018-03-27T08:00:00-04:002018-03-27T15:33:12-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-556517To write her YA novel <em>Emergency Contact</em>, Mary H.K. Choi had to figure out how to render texts between teens without sounding corny.<p>After 19 days, the fear and anxiety that have haunted the city of Austin, Texas, may have reached an end on Wednesday. The suspect in a series of bombings <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/us/austin-explosion-bombings.html?mtrref=undefined&amp;gwh=E5873BA8C8A78E56129B9D1EE16C55EF&amp;gwt=pay">blew himself up in a truck</a> as the police approached. Six different bombs, considered linked by the police, have killed two people and injured five more since March 2. Four of them exploded in Austin; one went off in a FedEx facility in Schertz, Texas (in a package headed for an Austin address); another was found and recovered undetonated at another FedEx facility near the Austin airport.</p><p>The suspect was a 23-year-old named Mark Conditt, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/21/austin-bombing-suspect-dies-after-detonating-explosive-in-his-vehicle-police-say/?utm_term=.948d0b8b8344">he left behind a videotaped confession</a>. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/us/austin-bombings-suspect.html?mtrref=www.google.com">According to <em>The New York Times</em></a><em>, </em>Austin officials have cautioned that there may still be other bombs out there, planted before the man died. While <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/us/mark-anthony-conditt-austin-bomber.html">it appears that Conditt worked alone</a>, authorities have not yet ruled out the possibility of accomplices. But even if it is truly over, residents of the Austin area have already been living with the knowledge that a bomber is at large for the better part of a month. That kind of violent-crime spree can take a toll on a community—both while it’s happening and after it’s over.</p><p>Michael Cannell is a journalist and the author of <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250048943">Incendiary</a>, </em>a book that chronicles the story of another serial bomber—the so-called “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York with more than 30 bombs in the 1950s. “He had kind of a genius for stoking fear,” Cannell says. “The fear in these cases is disproportionate to the actual threat. Homemade bombs—yes, they can kill and cause terrible damage, but they are not enormous explosives. They are days, or more likely, weeks, apart. Relative to the other threats—I’m thinking about gun deaths, I’m thinking about car accidents—serial bombers do not present a statistically enormous threat. Yet the fear and anxiety they produce can paralyze entire communities.”</p><p>“When you have an active perpetrator in a community, society is living on the edge of its seats, wondering when is the next shoe going to drop,” says Scott Bonn, a criminologist and the author of <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781629144320">Why We Love Serial Killers.</a> </em>“There’s heightened anxiety, it’s a state of terror.” Paranoia creeps in; in Austin, police responded to hundreds of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/austin-bombings-explosion.html">calls about suspicious packages</a>.</p><p>There’s still much that’s unknown in the Austin case, including the motive for the crime. But typically with a serial crime spree, be it bombings or serial killings, the sowing of fear is the point, Bonn says.</p><p>“I interviewed David Berkowitz”—the serial killer known as “Son of Sam” who killed six people in New York in 1976—“and he was well aware that he had New York City in the palm of his hand,” Bonn adds.</p><p>Under these conditions, people may go to great lengths to change their behavior to feel a modicum of safety. Because Berkowitz targeted brunettes with long hair, some women in New York reportedly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/10/17/the-coincidence-that-caught-a-killer/297cf94b-64da-4c17-9cff-40853ee374cf/?utm_term=.a675dcd9553e">cut and dyed their hair</a>, or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/nyregion/07sam.html">covered it with wigs.</a> In 1990, when five University of Florida students were killed within days of each other, <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/08/30/in-dread-and-sorrow-campus-waits-out-hunt-for-killer/e31fb8d0-88f7-4944-beca-32846ec76976/?utm_term=.08e6166e105f">The Washington Post</a> </em>reported that stores in Gainesville saw a rush of mace and gun purchases.</p><p><a href="http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(06)00225-X/pdf">One study</a> found that during the 2002 sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., 45 percent of residents reported going to parks, shopping centers, and other public places less than usual. More than a third said they were staying home more, and a small percentage said they’d missed one or more days of work because of the attacks. In <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19730381">a separate study of D.C.’s homeless residents</a>, 65 percent said they’d restricted their activities during the attacks, presumably because they were more vulnerable and exposed than people who could take shelter in their homes.</p><p>In Austin, during this recent bombing spree, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/austin-bombings-explosion.html"><em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> reported</a> that some people were “avoiding opening packages or even answering their front doors out of fear,” though others were determined not to let the fear disrupt their lives. “People seemed to keep their eyes trained downward—looking for suspicious bags and backpacks, packages, and strands of wire across sidewalks.”</p><p>The sustained nature of a violent-crime spree, where the criminal remains at large for some time, makes it a different sort of trauma than a one-time event like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. After disasters, psychologists characterize people’s risk for negative mental-health effects by thinking about “dose of exposure,” says Amy Nitza, the director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz. People who were closer to the event, or exposed to it longer, are at greater risk.</p><p>But with the Austin bombings, “you have a greater number of people with a lower dose of exposure,” Nitza says. “Who is classified as a victim or a survivor becomes much more broad.”</p><p>One study referred to this kind of exposure as “continuous trauma” when looking at the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8320543">psychological state of some local students</a> nine days after the Gainesville murders. It found that depression was the main symptom seemingly brought on by the killings—not anxiety or stress. “While anxiety may have been quite pronounced in the first few days following the killings, we speculate that such high levels of anxiety were not sustained for a long period of time,” the authors write. “Perhaps when efforts to solve the crime quickly were unsuccessful, anxiety levels decreased as individuals began to feel helpless, hopeless, and depressed.”</p><p>“I see how that can make sense,” Nitza says. “When the situation is chronic, and there’s this chronic level of uncertainty and not knowing where the danger is, it’s really hard on people physiologically for their fight or flight response to stay on.”</p><p>(It’s worth mentioning that these effects are not exclusive to places that are briefly rampaged by a serial killer or serial bomber. <a href="http://cmepr.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Tekin-Sniper-Paper.pdf">A paper on the sniper attacks</a> noted that the psychological effects are likely similar to “those caused by the chronic community violence that is endemic to many inner-city neighborhoods in the United States.”)</p><p>Once the criminal is caught, and the situation resolved, “most people are resilient,” Nitza says. “They’re going to bounce back to their pre-event level of functioning.” It’s reasonable to expect that some, though, will continue to struggle. The study on D.C. residents, conducted seven months after the sniper attack, found that rates of PTSD symptoms were twice as high as rates in a nationally representative sample. Nitza says that people with previous histories of trauma are more likely to be at risk.</p><p>The broader psyche of a community is likely to be changed by such events, too, but it’s harder to quantify exactly how that disruption shapes the atmosphere of a place.“People may have their worldview shaken in a way you wouldn’t with a more acute geographically limited disaster,” Nitza says.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>George Metesky—the name of the “Mad Bomber” from the ’50s— tended to target public spaces, such as Radio City Music Hall and Grand Central Station. “He made us aware of how fragile our civic safety is,” Cannell says. The Austin bomber’s M.O. was in some ways even more invasive: putting bombs on people’s doorsteps. A reminder that people aren’t always safe even in their own homes.</p><p>In his book, Cannell quotes Metesky as saying: “I’ve read that a man with a hammer can wreck a 16-inch naval gun, just by hitting it until it shatters. It’s the same with bombs.”</p><p>Or in other words: “It isn’t about the size of the explosion,” Cannell says. “It’s about the size of the public reaction.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedDrew Anthony Smith / GettyPolice tape marks off the neighborhood where a package bomb went off on March 19, 2018, in Austin, Texas.A Spree of Violence Can Shake a Community's Worldview2018-03-22T11:44:00-04:002018-03-22T14:23:09-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-556205The “continuous trauma” of a drawn-out event like the Austin bombings is different than a one-time disaster.<p>In the skin-care aisle at the CVS pharmacy closest to my office, there are 106 different products for acne. I lurked in the store for an hour last week tallying anything with the words “acne,” “blemish,” or “blackhead” on the packaging. I did not include products labeled “pore refining,” because that seems fake.</p><p>There are 101 antiaging products on the shelves. This includes anything that claims to fight wrinkles, or that is labeled “antiaging” or “age defying.” I did not count the following terms: “age perfect,” “lifting,” “for sagging skin,” or “for mature skin,” even though those were clearly meant to evoke antiaging effects without explicitly saying so.</p><p>There were 155 types of body lotion and 177 types of face lotion, although in certain cases it was hard to tell which category a particular product would fall under. I included anything called a “lotion,” “moisturizer,” “cream,” “gel,” “gel-cream,” “cream-gel,” “moisturizing oil,” “salve,” “hydrating mist,” “intense-hydration concentrate,” and in one case—may God have mercy on my soul— “daily liquid care.” I did not tally “cream cleansers,” “serums,” “treatments,” “fillers,” or “elixirs.”</p><p>These are just some of the over-the-counter skin-care products available at one drugstore. We haven’t even gotten into cleansers, let alone masks or scrubs or toners. Suffice it to say, figuring out what skin-care products to use can be daunting.</p><p>The skin-care industry uniquely straddles the line between health and aesthetics, between drugs and cosmetics. Acne and other skin conditions often require medical treatment and prescription drugs, yet it’s possible to treat some breakouts, or dryness, or redness, at home. Sometimes there may be nothing <em>wrong, </em>per se, but one’s skin could always be a little more even, a little softer, a little glowier, couldn’t it? There’s also a certain amount of care needed to maintain the status quo—to stay clean, moisturized, and protected from the sun.</p><p>All of these pursuits fall under the umbrella of “skin care.” The industry does little to help anyone make sense of it. In fact, it is often deliberately confusing.</p><p>A few common skin-care ingredients are regulated as drugs. These include those in sunscreen; salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide, which are used to treat acne; and adapalene, the main ingredient in the newly over-the-counter product Differin. Many more are not. The Food and Drug Administration defines “drugs” as:</p><blockquote>
<p>Articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. ... [And] articles (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals.</p>
</blockquote><p>It defines “cosmetics” as:</p><blockquote>
<p>Articles intended to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed on, introduced into, or otherwise applied to the human body ... for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance.</p>
</blockquote><p>When does “altering the appearance” cross over into “affecting the structure or function of the body?” Skin-care companies are very careful in their phrasing to stay on the less burdensome cosmetic side of that line. Many of the antiaging products on the CVS shelves claim to “diminish the <em>look</em> of fine lines and wrinkles” (emphasis mine). Commercials throw out statistics like 90 percent of women saw improvements in the skin after just one use of product X, Y, or Z. But “wrinkles do look better when you hydrate the skin,” says Tiffany Cukrowski, a dermatologist at the Midwest Center for Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery. “So it has a moisturizing effect, not a true antiaging effect.”</p><p>Cosmetics are innocent until proven guilty. Their ingredients don’t have to be proven safe, or effective. Even if a particular ingredient has some evidence behind it, cosmetic manufacturers aren’t required to prove that the ingredient works in that product’s specific formulation, or at that particular concentration. Often, the only way to figure out if something works is to try it.</p><p>The skin-care landscape is vast, overwhelming, and shimmering with mirages. But more and more people are trying to navigate it. The skin-care market is projected only to keep growing in the next couple years, according to data from <a href="http://www.euromonitor.com">Euromonitor</a>, a market-research provider. “Everybody’s obsessed with skin care right now,” Ashley Weatherford <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/everybody-obsessed-with-skincare-now.html">writes in the <em>The Cut</em></a>.</p><p>In <em>The Outline</em>, Krithika Varagur <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/3151/the-skincare-con-glossier-drunk-elephant-biologique-recherche-p50?zd=3&amp;zi=knrmnsgk">writes</a> that “perfect skin has become the thinking woman’s quest.” She goes on to say that skin care is a consumerist scam, but she’s touched on something with her emphasis on “thinking.” Confronted with the multitudinous choices and absent good information about the efficacy of different products, many skin-care fans have become citizen scientists—educating themselves and each other about what works and experimenting on their own faces.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>“For most of my life I wasn’t too serious about skin care. I’d use random drugstore products that I was drawn to on a purely superficial level,” the beauty writer Rio Viera-Newton told me in an email. “Only after college, when, for various medical reasons, I went off birth control and started having really aggressive, painful breakouts, did I decide I wanted to create a routine for myself. I was initially really overwhelmed by all the information and advice out there on the internet. I read just about every article on hormonal acne and would binge-watch ‘How I Cured My Hormonal Acne’ YouTube videos for hours.”</p><p>Viera-Newton eventually got it figured out—partly by consulting a dermatologist, and partly by narrowing down her online searches to recommendations from people who shared her dry, sensitive skin type. She built up a routine, and is now dispensing skin-care advice for <em>The Strategist</em>. A post she wrote in the summer of 2017, “<a href="http://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-skin-care-products-routine.html">The Google Doc I Send to People Who Ask About My Skin</a>,” details her elaborate skin regimen. It was so widely shared that one of the autofill options when I google her name is “Rio Viera-Newton google doc.”</p><p>Framing the article as Viera-Newton’s advice to her friends was savvy. Because there are so many products out there, and because there are so many good reasons to be skeptical of brands’ claims about them, word of mouth often feels like the most trustworthy resource for information on over-the-counter skin care. People often turn to their friends—or their favorite beauty bloggers—to find out what <em>really </em>works. (Dermatologists, of course, are the best resource, but if you don’t have a medical reason to see one, you’re not likely to pop in and ask if you should be using Noxzema or Neutrogena face wash.)</p><p>My own skin-care routine is cobbled together with prescriptions from my dermatologist alongside recommendations from coworkers at bars, from the beauty writer <a href="https://arabellesicardi.contently.com/">Arabelle Sicardi</a>, from the private makeup and skin-care Slack channel I share with my friends (called “People With Faces”), and from the subreddit r/SkincareAddiction.</p><p>This forum is the most visible repository of the apparently growing interest in the science of skin care. It has more than 450,000 readers, and the growth curve of its subscriber base has <a href="http://redditmetrics.com/r/SkincareAddiction">notably steepened since mid-2017</a>. Its posts are a mix of memes, users seeking advice, product reviews, before-and-after skin selfies, and “shelfies”—pictures of users’ bathroom shelves crowded with products. But it also has an exceptionally well-organized reference section, summarizing the conclusions of the hive mind on ingredients, the identification and treatment of certain skin conditions, the best products, and how to build an effective routine with them. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction/comments/1fmg0t/some_more_information_about_sebaceous_filaments/">Many posts</a> refer to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction/comments/1j4l9o/just_want_to_share_what_my_doctor_told_me_today/cbb2fen/">scientific papers</a> in their explanations.</p><p>The core of the subreddit’s advice boils down to a routine of two to five steps: Cleansing and moisturizing, with the “optional” additions of exfoliating (chemical exfoliators are preferable to scrubs), spot-treating blemishes, and sunscreen (“optional but highly recommended”). It has product recommendations for each of those categories (the community crowdsources its “Holy Grail” recommendations), and there are further rabbit holes to burrow into if you want to get into antiaging or specialty serums or whatnot.</p><p>“The advice was definitely decent,” Cukrowski, the dermatologist, says of the subreddit. “Especially the part where they talked about whether you need a toner or not. I always tell my patients you don’t need a toner unless you’re really oily.”</p><p>Michelle Wong is a moderator at r/SkincareAddiction, and a high-school science teacher in Sydney, Australia, with a chemistry Ph.D. She says that “on the whole, [r/SkincareAddiction] is probably one of the most scientifically accurate sources. Where they get it wrong is mostly in the details and the really nitty-gritty. But if you follow the advice on there, it will be maybe 90 percent the same as a completely accurate regime.”</p><p>Wong also runs the popular blog <em><a href="https://labmuffin.com/">Lab Muffin</a></em>, where she writes about the science of skin care—explaining <a href="https://labmuffin.com/fact-check-what-is-micellar-water-and-how-does-it-work-an-update/">how the molecules in micellar water remove makeup</a>, or <a href="https://labmuffin.com/what-is-hyaluronic-acid-and-how-does-it-work/">why hyaluronic acid is such a good moisturizer</a>. Her Instagram, where she often debunks beauty myths, has more than 32,000 followers.</p><p>“When I started my blog I didn’t think I would get any sort of audience, but it’s gotten quite big,” she says. “A lot of people tell me, ‘I hated science, but this is really interesting. If it’d been taught like this in school, I would’ve been really interested in chemistry.’ So people are getting more educated about how things work.”</p><p>Dana Sachs, a dermatologist at the University of Michigan, says she’s seen her patients “come in and ask more pointed questions about different products than they used to.”</p><p>Some skin-care brands are catching on to this savvy consumer base. In late 2016, the beauty company DECEIM launched its brand The Ordinary, a line of simply packaged serums labeled with just their active ingredients and concentrations. You can buy “Retinol 0.2 percent in Squalane,” or “Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate 10 percent,” or “Niacinimide 10 percent + Zinc 1 percent”—not exactly the catchiest-sounding products. But according to DECEIM’s former co-CEO, Nicola Kilner (who <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/2/22/17039766/deciem-co-ceo-fired">has left the company under bizarre circumstances</a> since our interview), The Ordinary is the company’s biggest brand, and sold 8 million units in its first year. She attributes this to the brand being “led by consumers.”</p><p>The Ordinary started listing the pH of its products as a result of customers clamoring for that information, Kilner says. And in the closed Facebook group “The Ordinary and DECEIM Chat Room,” which has nearly 32,000 members, she says the discussions can get pretty scientific, with users sharing spreadsheets of their routines and talking about ingredient interactions.</p><p>“We’re led by the fact that they do have this appetite,” Kilner says. “They do want to learn. They no longer want to just believe in hocus-pocus potions. They want to actually understand what ingredients they’re using at what percentage.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>Unfortunately, this desire for understanding can quickly run up against a wall. Academic studies are often inaccessible to the public. And even though there is some good research on skin care out there, it’s understandably skewed toward prescription drugs and the treatment of medical skin conditions like acne and eczema.</p><p>“My background is in medicinal chemistry, so I’m used to saying if [a study] is under 100 subjects, then it’s not worth looking at,” Wong says. “But in skin care, if it has more than 10 subjects, it’s amazing, because there’s just not funding. Because it’s not regulated as drugs.”</p><p>For ingredients that do have evidence behind them, there are often caveats and unknowns that remain.</p><p>Take the chemical compounds known as retinoids. “There is really good evidence behind topical retinoids exerting a positive antiaging benefit in skin,” Sachs says. They increase skin’s collagen production, and can combat hyperpigmentation. Prescription retinoids like tretinoin are a mainstay of dermatological antiaging treatment. But the form found in over-the-counter products—retinol—is what is known as a prodrug, meaning it doesn’t convert into the active form of retinoic acid until it’s in the body. Some studies have found retinol to be an effective antiaging treatment, though far less potent than tretinoin (and less irritating). But retinol is “extremely unstable and easily gets degraded to biologically inactive forms on exposure to light and air,” <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2699641/">as one meta-analysis put it.</a></p><p>With an over-the-counter product, “you don’t necessarily know how much of it you’re getting, or how active the ingredient is,” Sachs says. “Not that we know what the right concentration is.” Even the most dogged amateur skin-care scientist won’t be able to figure out what research doesn’t yet know, or what information is hidden by manufacturers.</p><p>Another issue with many topical skin products, Sachs says, is that “they have to penetrate the very strong stratum corneum, which is the top layer of the skin.” The skin is a barrier, after all, designed to keep things out. With cosmetics that aren’t tested, there’s no way to know if the molecules penetrate deep enough into the skin to have any effect.</p><p>One popular group of ingredients that Sachs and Cukrowski are both skeptical of is peptides. Peptides are chains of amino acids, often included in antiaging serums and creams, with the thought that they might stimulate collagen production. “But one of the issues with peptides—that I don’t know the answer to—is they tend to be huge molecules that don’t necessarily penetrate into the skin,” Sachs says.</p><p>“The peptides are a big scam,” Cukrowski says.</p><p>Indeed, skin care, like any trend, has seen its share of backlash. In her <em>Outline</em> article, “The Skincare Con,” Varagur questioned the purpose of the entire industry: “All of this is a scam. It has to be. ... Most skin care is really just a waste of money.” There certainly are ample opportunities to waste one’s money on insanely pricey serums and lotions.</p><p>But just because there are some dubious claims floating around doesn’t mean we should throw our baby-smooth skin out with the bathwater. There are also things like sunscreen, and acne medication, and moisturizer, that are uncontroversially effective.</p><p>“As we get older, skin gets thinner, it gets drier,” Sachs says. “The barrier is not as good as it used to be. Whenever there are breaks in the barrier, that’s when you are more prone to infection, that can lead to inflammation in the skin. Moisturizing the skin is really key to keeping it in good shape. Now does the type of moisturizer matter? I don’t know the answer to that.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>What that leaves you with, in many cases, is anecdotal evidence, and trial and error-ing products on your own face.</p><p>“Obviously the problem with that is you have one face, so it’s like an n=1 trial,” Wong says. “You don’t know if the product works or if it was sunny that week, so you got more sun, or you started exercising that week as well.”</p><p>There’s an element of trial and error in medical dermatology, too. People have different skin types, and some are more irritated by certain ingredients than others. “It’s not like shooting in the dark,” Sachs says. But “that’s the art of medicine. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all for every person who comes in, otherwise, we wouldn’t spend as long training as we do. There are not cookbook recommendations for all the things out there.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Of course, any would-be citizen skin-care scientists should practice lab safety. It’s possible to overdo it and injure yourself with <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/i-dont-want-no-scrubs/512237/?utm_source=feed">harsh scrubs</a> or exfoliating acids, or to have a bad reaction to an ingredient that you didn’t patch test before rubbing it all over your face. And despite the popularity of <a href="https://sokoglam.com/pages/the-korean-skin-care-routine">10-step Korean skin-care regimens</a>, there’s also a threshold past which adding more products to your routine isn’t likely to yield additional results.</p><p>“You really just need a sunscreen, a cleanser, and a moisturizer,” Wong says. “On top of that, if your skin isn’t already quite good, then you might need an antiaging or anti-acne product. But once you have the right products, a lot of it is just fiddling, [getting] decreasing marginal returns.”</p><p>The skin-care craze is sometimes derided as just another <a href="https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/vbdyz4/is-perfect-skin-the-final-beauty-standard-we-cant-break-down">unattainable beauty standard</a>—now women are supposed to look flawless without makeup?—to which <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/01/skincare-can-be-fun-and-therapeutic.html">others respond</a> that it’s a form of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-year-that-skin-care-became-a-coping-mechanism">self-care</a>. <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/3/29/14962578/sephoras-beauty-talk-online-community">A ritual</a>, a devotional. It can be all of those things. But it’s also an at-home science project, one with results you can see in the mirror.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedShutterstock / Thanh Do / The AtlanticHow Skin Care Became an At-Home Science Experiment2018-03-09T04:30:00-05:002018-03-09T10:26:27-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-555125Faced with an overwhelming, opaque, and largely unregulated industry, people crowdsource tips and educate themselves about skin products.<p>The last time I was ever truly lost was in the summer of 2013. It was in St. Petersburg, Russia. I traveled there for work, and after four days of fighting jet lag to cram in sightseeing on the side, I fell asleep on a bus, nodding off over the copy of <em>A Clash of Kings</em> I’d been carrying with me during the trip.</p><p>When I woke up, I had no idea how long I’d been out and if I’d missed my stop. The stop was right across the street from my hotel—pretty easy to spot if you’re not asleep. So I tried to ask the bus driver if we’d passed the Park Inn. I didn’t speak Russian and he didn’t speak English, but he nonetheless made it very clear that passengers were not allowed to talk to him.</p><p>I was saved by a young Russian woman who overheard my distress. She tried to explain to me, in English, how to get back to the hotel (we had definitely already passed it), but perhaps seeing that her directions were not breaking through the fog of my panic, ended up getting off the bus with me at the next stop and drawing me a map. She had perfect winged eyeliner, and once she noticed my book, we talked about <em>Game of Thrones </em>for a while.</p><p>The instructions were simple: There was one, long main road, and I just needed to follow it all the way back to the hotel. She warned me it could take a while. I guess I’d had a pretty long nap. I thanked her with the gratitude of the truly desperate, and set off.</p><p>It was indeed a long way. It was late, too—but since it was summer in Russia, the sun had only just set, and I still had a lavender 11 p.m. twilight to navigate by. I cried a little bit and felt sorry for myself as I walked, worried that the woman’s map would be wrong or that I would make a wrong turn. I wasn’t totally convinced I would make it back.</p><p>Then a small and sprightly young man bounded up to me, seemingly out of nowhere. He asked me, in English, if I knew where McDonald’s was. I did not.</p><p>“Are you from the cruise ship?” he asked. He was neither Russian nor American; his accent was one I couldn’t place.</p><p>Apparently, there was a cruise ship docked nearby, and with precious little time remaining before he had to return to it, he was on a quest to consume a Big Mac.</p><p>He asked me about myself, and when he heard I was lost, said he would walk with me for a while. I told him about the event I was covering in St. Petersburg; he told me about his cruise. I had already been shaken a bit out of my panic and self-pity just by his arrival, but he kept me calm until the illuminated Park Inn appeared on the horizon. A small distance away, the lights of a cruise ship glittered in the harbor.</p><p>In short order, the man spotted someone he knew from the ship, and ran off to join them. “Goodbye, Julie, I love you!” he shouted as he shot back into the night, a bullet in search of a Big Mac.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>A few months later, I bought my first smartphone. I haven’t been lost since—not in the enormous, sweeping, helpless way I was then. I still get turned around occasionally, or confused about where something is, but my phone is always with me, and as long as there’s a signal, there’s a map that can clear up that confusion. My Russian misadventure feels like it might be the last time I’m going to be lost with no map at my disposal, utterly at the mercy of strangers.</p><p>I was curious if others felt the same way, so I set about collecting more of these moments—memories of the last times people felt really, truly lost. I suspected many of them would come from the pre-smartphone era—and some of them did—but while it’s easy to think that an interactive map in every pocket would make the experience of getting lost obsolete, it hasn’t. People still get lost, but the proliferation of digital maps has definitely changed the landscape, if you will, of when and how people lose their way.</p><p>All the stories in this piece were told to me in interviews, then edited and condensed for clarity.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Dan Krzykowski, a 34-year-old in Minneapolis who works in music publishing</strong></p>
<p>The exact date is hard to pin down, but it would have been just before the proliferation of smartphones. 2007 or 2006. I had been invited to Duluth, Minnesota, to spend time with a friend’s family, and one of the things he pitched doing was snowmobiling—on groomed trails in the woods and on frozen lakes and things like that.</p>
<p>People treat it as sort of a barhopping thing, possibly not wisely. The same bars that are open in the summer for fishing and boating people—generally on a lake—they’ll stay open for packs of snowmobiles to come in and get a beer. So that was the plan.</p>
<p>I was on one of the snowmobiles by myself, and two friends of mine were on a sled together. This was pitch-black of night in the woods. I took a turn and missed how sharp it was and just went a few feet into the brush. The sled got stuck and they didn’t notice because they were on a very loud machine that just kept going.</p>
<p>After about 15 or 20 minutes I figured they’re not going to find me. So I got the snowmobile back on the trail. It was legitimately the first time I had ever been <em>lost </em>lost and it is also the last. It hasn’t happened since. I just decided to guess when I got to forks and try not to go in circles. I had a flip phone, and there was no service.</p>
<p>Eventually after about an hour, the woods opened up onto a lake. I saw a light on the other side, and figured this must be one of those bars. It just so happened that that is the one my friends were going to. I walked in, and I asked them if they had noticed I wasn’t behind them and my roommate said, “Yes, we figured you’d be fine.” And then he said to sit down and have a beer.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Pamela Kingfisher, 66, a consultant near Tahlequah, Oklahoma</strong></p>
<p>It was about 2002, with my husband, in Tennessee. We were exploring Cherokee heritage sites and had gone to the old town of Chota, just northeast of Chattanooga. It’s right at the edge of the mountains. We prayed and laid down tobacco, did the whole thing. Then we got in the car and thought, “Let’s go this other way.” We think this map—paper map, back in the day, we didn’t have a cell phone either—shows that this hill goes up over and we’ll go to this other old Cherokee town. So we take a left instead of a right and end up going up this hill. There’s no signage. We saw no houses, no people, no cars, and it was like the forest just kept moving in on us. The roads got skinnier, the trees were hanging over and touching.</p>
<p>I’ve been in every state, 72 Indian reservations, and I don’t get scared very often. But it just got stranger and more like a fairy tale coming into animation or something. I don’t think we ever reached the top of that mountain, it got steeper and skinnier and scarier. It felt like the land and the roads were taking over and we were just kind of coasting along and maybe shouldn’t be there. We finally just stopped and kept looking at the map, and looking at each other. We just turned around and left like our pants were on fire. It was too scary.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>There were multiple stages of the digital-map takeover. MapQuest launched in 1996 as a web service, and briefly enjoyed status as a verb—“I’m going to MapQuest directions to the party”—in the era when people would look up directions at home, print them out, and take them on their journey.</p><p>“I’m right on that edge where I experienced that,” Krzykowski told me. “Writing things down on a Post-it note and putting it in your wallet.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>But in the mid-2000s, MapQuest fell out of favor. <a href="https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-your-way.html">Google Maps launched</a> in 2005, and became <a href="http://googlepress.blogspot.no/2007/11/google-announces-launch-of-google-maps_28.html">available on mobile in 2007</a>. You know how that worked out. (Although, incredibly, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/does-mapquest-still-exist-as-a-matter-of-fact-it-does/2015/05/22/995d2532-fa5d-11e4-a13c-193b1241d51a_story.html?utm_term=.5c766485b4f6">MapQuest still exists</a>—and it’s profitable.)</p><p>“Now, I barely think about where I’m going and how I’m going to get there,” Krzykowski says. “I’ve just completely off-loaded that task.”</p><p>But that off-loading creates new ways for people to get lost. Perhaps people are less likely to get turned around on their everyday travels than they once were, but GPS isn’t perfect. Maps might not be updated with construction areas, for example, and location tracking can be laggy. How many times have you spun around on a street corner staring at your phone, trying to orient Google Maps’ little blue “you are here” dot?</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Andy Lee, 42, the vice president and managing director of Asia/Pacific at Mapbox</strong>, <strong>a digital mapping company</strong></p>
<p>I was leaving a meeting in Jakarta, and I gave myself two hours to go from downtown to the main international airport. I used a popular ride-sharing app. First, it took him about 30 minutes to get to me. On the map it looked like he was super close. But there was so much heavy traffic in downtown Jakarta, and when he made a wrong turn, he basically had to go half a mile, and then make a U-turn and come all the way back.</p>
<p>Then we go on the roads and it was apparent that the driver doesn’t often go to the airport, and so he wasn’t sure exactly how to go. He missed a turn because he was relying on navigation as well, and just interpreted it incorrectly.</p>
<p>We ended up in this side village off the highway. By the time we got back on, I realized that Jakarta has a new airport, and that terminal was actually half a mile away from the other terminal. The app will do a very quick auto-complete—I typed in CGK ,which is the code for the Jakarta airport, and I quickly selected it, but I didn’t realize it had picked the brand-new airport. So the driver got me to the new airport and then I realized that’s not the terminal I need.</p>
<p>We ended up on a dirt road, trying to get through this construction site, because the two airports weren’t perfectly connected yet. He literally was driving me through a construction site. I kept looking at my map and freaking out. The closest I could get is the parking lot of terminal one. There was still traffic all the way to the airport. I could continue to [try to] go there, or I could run through the parking lot to cut through the traffic, lugging my little suitcase with me. I opted to get out of the car and run through a parking lot. Bear in mind I was dressed for a meeting, not dressed to go lugging a four-wheel suitcase and a backpack. As a result of this little adventure through Jakarta, I missed my flight.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>Even in a world that is more mapped than ever, maps can still betray you. Or, perhaps, people often disorient themselves through overreliance on these maps. “At the end of the day, with all this technology, global positioning, it’s still up to human judgment,” Lee says. “A map is still subject to human interpretation.”</p><p>Plus, GPS doesn’t reach every nook and cranny of the world. Not yet. There are still places where cell signal is poor, where maps have little detail.</p><p>“I live in Cherokee county. At my house, cellphones don’t work. On most reservations, there’s no cell coverage,” Kingfisher says. “When you get onto dirt roads, a lot of them just don’t show up on the map. That’s why I love rural America. Thank God there’s wild places.”</p><p>Even in more populated areas, there are places too small or detailed for digital maps to reach, but where a body can still get turned around, like parks, or buildings:</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Katharine Harmon, 57, the author of <em><a href="http://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781568984308">You Are Here</a> </em>and <em><a href="https://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781568987620">The Map as Art</a></em></strong></p>
<p>In the very northwest corner of Washington state are some islands, the San Juan Islands, and there’s an island called Lopez Island where I spend a lot of time. And in the center of that island is a forest. It sounds like a fairy tale. This forest is well-known on the island, people get lost there a lot, and at some point they even put up some trail signs with these little symbols about which trail is the lightning bolt trail and which trail is the mountain trail and so on, but it didn’t help. People still get lost there. So sometimes if I’m going to go for a run or go for a hike there, I’ll say to my family, “Okay, I’m going to get lost!” And they know exactly where I’m going.</p>
<p>But one of the times I was with a friend there, we went late in the afternoon and [got lost, and] I think we were there probably for three or four hours. We came out in the pitch black, and had to flag down a car to take us home because we were just absolutely exhausted. We didn’t even want to walk home. We [had] started running. It wasn’t so much that we were panicked, but it was starting to set in a bit. I think when you get lost and you're with somebody else, one person plays the role of being the one who keeps things lighthearted and laughing because the other one is on the edge of losing it. That’s my experience. I think it’s really different when you’re lost with another person versus when you’re lost alone. Because when you’re lost alone your mind has to play both roles somehow.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Matilda Kreider, 19, a political-communication student at George Washington University</strong></p>
<p>In October I was interning for the Wilderness Society, so I was dropping off papers in the Senate offices, in the Russell office building. It’s a pretty complex building—it’s like a polygon with a courtyard at the center. So, a lot of hallways. And there are parts where you have to take an elevator up, get on another elevator and then go down just to keep walking on the same hallway.</p>
<p>I had finished my errand, but then I did another lap and realized I had passed Marco Rubio’s office again. And of course, that’s of note. That’s when I realized I’d been walking for a while and hadn’t seen an exit.</p>
<p>It was a situation where a map’s not going to help me because I’m inside a building. And I was too embarrassed to go into a senator’s office and be like “Could you help me find an exit?” I finally found a courtyard—it’s been an hour at this point—and I saw a door at the other side of the courtyard. I’m thinking, “Thank God, this must be an open courtyard.” I walk through it and all of a sudden I’m back inside the building again, because the courtyard’s in the middle. So I wandered and wandered and then found a security guard and said “I need help.” At this point I was laughing at myself because I’d been there an hour longer than I was supposed to be. But I escaped.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>It feels to me less like digital maps are erasing the experience of being lost, and more like they are pushing it to the extreme ends of a spectrum, and flattening out the middle. There are the small ways of being lost that maps can’t help, and then there are the grand ways, which seem often to happen when people are traveling, and don’t have access to maps on their phone.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Chris Devers, a 41-year-old in Somerville, Massachusetts, who works in IT</strong></p>
<p>This wasn’t necessarily the last time but it was the most memorable time. It would’ve been November of 2005. My wife and I were in Europe, and we were driving to Salzburg, Austria, trying to find our hotel for the night.</p>
<p>I speak a little bit of German, but not really, and she doesn’t speak any. I’m driving, she’s navigating, looking at the map on paper. We’re having trouble getting oriented on the map, and we keep going in circles. And it's been a while. Finally I’m like, “Where are you having us go, I don't understand, we keep going on the same street. And she’s like, “Well there seems to be something important up here.” We were following big prominent, signs, with big helpful arrows, saying go toward “Einbahnstraße.” And I’m like, “Einbahnstraße?” That means “one-way street”!</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Pete Collard, 46, an architecture Ph.D. student in London</strong></p>
<p>The last time was when I was in Baikonur in 2012. It’s a Russian town in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert. I was on a research trip with an architectural school; we were visiting some ex–Soviet Union industrial spaces. We’d been to Chernobyl, and we were going to Baikonur to go and see a rocket launch. The town was built for one purpose which was to send rockets up. It’s where Yuri Gagarin, all the Sputniks and everything went up from. So everything was built at the same time and everything looks the same and it’s also in the same condition of decay.</p>
<p>We arrived in the evening, and in the spirit of being in Russia, we were trying vodka and various other things. To the point that I missed the wake-up call the next morning, and everybody left to go on an excursion. I thought, that’s okay, I’ll go and explore the town on my own. But after a while I got a bit confused about my bearings because, as I said, everything looked exactly the same. And I didn’t see many people about. I had a phone, probably had an iPhone at that stage, but it wasn’t connecting to anything.</p>
<p>I got a bit paranoid. As a British citizen walking around what is still effectively a semi-military town, we had to get lots of permits and things to be there. If I did get picked up by the police or something, I didn’t speak any Russian, I couldn’t really explain where my friends were, couldn’t even remember where my hostel was. It was the middle of summer as well, so it’s baking hot. It was a Kafkaesque kind of experience.</p>
<p>It got to the point where I was thinking if I find our bus I will recognize the bus. So as I was walking around, I was looking for a white bus. It was almost like looking for a white rabbit or something, in <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>. After wandering around all day, by chance I found the rest of the group and the bus, they were swimming down by the river, looked quite surprised that I was so confused and desperately pleased to see them.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>Even though it can be stressful, there’s still a romanticism attached to the idea of getting lost while traveling—the possibility of happy accidents, unplanned discoveries, and connections with strangers. Many people have <a href="http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20110728-travelwise-the-art-of-getting-lost">bemoaned</a> the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34473588">death of this experience</a> at the hands of <a href="https://longreads.com/2017/05/08/the-lost-art-of-getting-lost/">smartphones and their maps</a>, noting with regret that travelers now “choose efficiency at the expense of discovery,” as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/travel/19EssayLostEurope.html?mtrref=www.google.com">Stephanie Rosenbloom put it in <em>The New York Times</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>“Part of the fun of going to new places is getting lost sometimes,” Collard says. “The city sometimes reveals itself to you. But only if you’re willing to let it do it. You have to open up a bit and perhaps put your phone away.”</p><p>There is some magic in these moments. I do treasure the memory of my Big Mac–hunting guardian angel. But to whatever degree digital maps kill discovery (and there’s no way it’s 100 percent), they also provide a sense of safety and autonomy to people—especially women—as they move through unfamiliar environments.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><blockquote>
<p><strong>Sommer Mathis, 38, the editor in chief of <em>Atlas Obscura</em></strong></p>
<p>I was 19 years old and this would be 1999, so long before I ever had a smartphone. I had been doing a study-abroad program for the summer in Paris, and my older sister decided to come visit me for a week and we ended up going to Amsterdam for the weekend together And then as soon as we got there, she came down with terrible bug and had a fever and really couldn’t do anything. She needed to stay in bed. But I was very excited to go explore the city. So one night I just left her in the hotel and went out on my own. Being that age and being American, I was not super used to being able to go to bars. And of course, also being in Amsterdam, I ended up being offered some marijuana. I had a little bit, and then I decided to take a walk. It’s maybe 9 p.m. or something at this point.</p>
<p>There are canals and there are a lot of little winding streets. A lot of the streets kind of look the same. At some point I realized that A) I had no idea where I was, and B) that I was inebriated, which was not helping. So I ended up stopping into some other bar and had a beer and this guy who was also sitting at the bar started chatting me up. I was trying to play it cool but very nervous and out of sorts. So this guy offers to buy me a beer and I’m like “I don’t know,” and then he kind of starts chiding me about not being friendly. I finally just explained to him, “I’m a little bit stoned and I’ve lost my way and I don’t know how to get back to my hotel.” And he’s like, “What hotel are you staying in?”</p>
<p>At this point I have a choice to make. I just decided that I needed help and used my best instincts about this person. So I told him what hotel I was staying in and he was like, “No problem, I know where that is. I’m walking in that direction, I will walk you back there.” And I’m like, “Okay.” I really felt totally helpless. But the whole time he’s walking me back to my hotel, I’m really kicking myself, like, “This is a ridiculous decision to make, I should never have done this.” But sure enough, he absolutely just walked me straight back to my hotel. But I remember that I didn’t know what was going to happen when we got back to the hotel, and was just very relieved that nothing happened.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><p>“I can sympathize with that romantic notion that wandering in an unfamiliar place is great because you never know what you might stumble on,” Mathis says. “But in practical terms, as a woman who often is out walking alone, I do have my guard up. I have my city face on. And the technology that we have now does make me feel like I can be self-sufficient almost anywhere. And that’s something I value.”</p><p>Tausha Cowan, a 32-year-old communications manager and travel blogger at <em><a href="http://www.theglobegetter.com/">The Globe Getter</a>, </em>says she uses Google Maps “religiously” while traveling. If she suspects that somewhere she’s visiting won’t have internet service, she downloads offline maps.</p><p>“I’m all for wandering,” she says. “But what I can say for myself is it wasn’t a pleasant experience to feel truly lost. I’m definitely a firm believer in sometimes going off of a route, but maybe doing it with some safeguards, so if you feel like you’re in an uncomfortable situation, you have a way to get out quickly.”</p><p>There are many ways to be lost. Some have declined due to technology; others are newly born. But in every situation, to be lost is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is frightening, often dangerous, but it also breeds connection—with people, and with places. The maps people carry in their pockets can be a barrier to that connection, but they are also safety nets. And it’s easier to take a leap if you know there’s something at the bottom to catch you.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedGeorge Redon / Getty"Le Tourisme"How Digital Maps Have Changed What It Means to Be Lost2018-02-23T12:31:00-05:002018-03-05T10:38:20-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553997Tales of people losing their way, before and after GPS<p dir="ltr">We are in the throes of the “emo revival,” apparently. It’s a term that’s applied both to <a href="https://www.spin.com/featured/best-emo-revival-albums-ranked/">newer bands</a> embodying the ethos of the genre—heartfelt, with punk roots—and to the wave of 2000s nostalgia among Millennials. This nostalgia has led to<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-rise-of-emo-nostalgia"> emo-themed dance nights around the U.S.</a>, new music, and<strong> </strong>tours from bands like Brand New, The Starting Line, and Mae.</p><p dir="ltr">But in the early 2000s, as emo broke into the mainstream, the “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/arts/music-sweet-sentimental-and-punk.html">icon</a>,” the “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Feels-Good-Punk-Teenagers/dp/0312308639">breakout star</a>,” the “<a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1476578/new-releases-dashboard-confessional-state-property-steve-burns-big-gipp-freddy-vs-jason-soundtrack-more/">poster boy</a>” of the genre was Chris Carrabba, with his band Dashboard Confessional. Though the emo label got applied to many different kinds of music—clever pop punk, angsty hardcore, proto-indie acoustic—somehow Carrabba and his strummy eager singalongs became the symbol of the genre. As the critic Andy Greenwald put it in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Feels-Good-Punk-Teenagers/dp/0312308639/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=FA5323SQZWR11H62Y5ZQ"><em>Nothing Feels Good</em></a>: “Love for Dashboard Confessional spread across the country in 2001 and 2002 like mono in the ’50s: an intimate interaction between mouthy teenagers.”</p><p dir="ltr">On Friday, Dashboard Confessional released their first album in almost nine years, <em>Crooked Shadows</em>. <em>The Atlantic</em>’s Julie Beck and Caroline Mimbs Nyce discuss the band’s revival, and how it compares to Carrabba’s classic sound.</p><hr><p dir="ltr"><strong>Julie Beck:</strong> There’s something so refreshing and soothing about a Dashboard Confessional song. Turning on one of their old albums feels to me like putting aloe on a sunburn. It’s partly nostalgia, I know, but there really is something special about the lack of artifice, the wholehearted commitment to a feeling that Carrabba gives his songs. He keeps his lyrics simple and honest for the most part, never hiding behind a smokescreen of cool, but he knows just the right details and turns of phrase to use to bring a moment to life, to make the specific feel universal. There’s a reason Dashboard Confessional concerts were famously singalongs—the songs felt like a shared experience. </p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf5qrVdD9E0">Vindicated</a>” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlqkQRQSn40">Hands Down</a>” are probably Dashboard’s most iconic songs, and for good reason, but if I were to point to one song that sums up what the band was at its best, it would probably be “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxrTzuIc2H8">The Brilliant Dance</a>,” off the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Places_You_Have_Come_to_Fear_the_Most"> second album.</a> That was my favorite, anyway. It was melodramatic but sweet, and grounded in finely drawn images and observations. “Measuring your minutes by a clock that’s blinking eights” is a line that’s stuck with me for years.</p><p dir="ltr">Caroline, you and I used to be those teenagers who caught the emo bug like mono, and I’m so excited to discuss this album with you. But first—what was it about Dashboard back in the day that felt special to you? What’s your favorite song? </p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Caroline Mimbs Nyce:</strong> I want to begin by disclosing that I once photoshopped the following words onto a black-and-white photo of myself: “Youth’s the most unfaithful mistress / Still we forge ahead to miss her.” And used it as my MySpace default photo. These lyrics are from the title track of Dashboard’s debut album, <em>The Swiss Army Romance.</em> And they summarize a lot of what Dashboard was for me: a perfect reflection of how much it can suck to be a teenager, especially when you don’t want to be a teen anymore.</p><p>Accordingly, my favorite song was “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most,” in which Carrabba describes someone who, despite seeming fine on the outside, is wrecked with inner turmoil. This idea comes up a lot in Dashboard’s early work. It’s also one of the painful realities of teendom: When you’re still learning how to express yourself, it’s easy to feel bottled up inside. But in “Places,” Carrabba makes it okay to drop the facade: “This is one time / That you can’t fake it hard enough to please everyone / Or anyone at all.” The song starts off melancholic and gradually builds; by the final chorus, Carrabba is screaming the words. I can remember so vividly screaming along with him.</p><p dir="ltr">But enough about the Dashboard of yesteryear. It’s 2018, and they’re back. How are you feeling about the new record?</p><p dir="ltr"><font face="Lyon Display, Georgia, Times, serif"><b>Beck: </b></font> The first single, and album opener, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cntsqw7XOF0">We Fight</a>,” is a shouty anthem that reminds me a little of “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNcgwuZZsTc">Don’t Wait</a>”—the first track off the 2006 album <em>Dusk and Summer</em>. Both have belted choruses and grand, sweeping full-band arrangements. But “Don’t Wait” has a memorable hook, and “We Fight” really … doesn’t. The lyrics are vague inspirational platitudes— “We never learned to keep our voices down / No, we only learned to shout / So we fight our way in /And we fight our way out”—that feel bloodless compared to the evocative imagery that was once the hallmark of a Dashboard song. “We Fight” sounds like Imagine Dragons gone emo, and for me, it was not a promising start.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Nyce</strong>: My first reaction was, “Is this <em>really</em> Dashboard?” Musically, it’s not dissimilar from the band’s earlier pop-rock ventures. But lyrically, it could not be more different. Carrabba sounds like some sort of community organizer for dispirited youths, here to reassure them things will get better. “There’s still a kid somewhere that needs to hear this,” he sings, “that somebody cares, that somebody knows.” There’s merit in the messaging, but the delivery falls a little flat—especially coming from the prince of emo, so often known for assuring us of the opposite. Not to split hairs, but your favorite song—2001’s “The Brilliant Dance”—features a narrator realizing that “nobody cares at all,” sung with a classic Carrabba howl. One could argue that “We Fight<strong>”</strong> is future-Carrabba speaking to that person.</p><p dir="ltr">That all being said, it’s very catchy. And it may well be the first Dashboard Confessional song that’s fit for a congressional reelection campaign.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Beck:</strong> The Carrabba howl is still good! This album strikes me as Dashboard Confessional’s attempt at stadium rock—many of the songs are way more bombastic than even the full-band stuff on previous albums. But I think the places where the album deviates from this through line are more interesting and, often, more successful.</p><p dir="ltr">One thing I’m wrestling with is that you and I are obviously coming to this album as big fans of the band’s old work. I don’t want to be the sort of grump who just wants more of the same, and faults the band for trying to grow and change. But at the same time, this is essentially a comeback album that’s surfing into the world on the wave of good feeling that fans have for a band they loved in their youth. So I want to evaluate it on its own merits, but I can’t help but think of the new music in terms of what it means for Dashboard’s overall legacy.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Nyce:</strong> By no means should Carrabba be condemned to a lifetime of teenage misery. After all, it’s been nearly 20 years since the band’s debut. It’s hard to ask him to continue to carry the baton of adolescent angst when he’s a married man in his 40s.</p><p dir="ltr">In a way, it’s fitting that this album comes now. Dashboard’s third full-length album, <em>A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar,</em> turns 15 later this year. <em>AMAMABAS</em> (as it used to be called on the DC messaging boards—yes, I was <em>that </em>teen) is the first record that really shows off Carrabba’s range. <em>AMAMABAS</em> introduced us to Carrabba as more than the guy who just got dumped. The lead single, the inimitable “Hands Down,” is arguably the first happy song on a Dashboard record. Back in 2003, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/arts/music-sweet-sentimental-and-punk.html"><em>The New York Times</em> called it </a>“a sly rejoinder to listeners who dismiss Mr. Carrabba as a one-dimensional whiner peddling second-hand heartbreak.”</p><p dir="ltr">The subsequent albums add even more dimensions,<strong> </strong>hitting more pop-rock notes. This latest album seems to build on the most recent one, <em>Alter the Ending. Crooked Shadows</em> feels very of-the-moment. (Is that a millennial whoop I hear on the album’s title track?) But I worry some of the pithier<strong> </strong>elements of his earlier music—like winking asides about how he’s going to “get some” on “Hands Down”—have been lost here. Some of the lyrical observations are a little bubblegum for my taste. Still, I could see my teenage self blasting a few of the later tracks.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Beck: </strong>I definitely agree that <em>Crooked Shadows</em> seems to follow on the heels of <em>Alter the Ending </em>(which I didn’t think was their best work either), but it turns up the rock dial even more. And I just don’t think it works very well. It doesn't help that many of the Imagine Dragons–esque numbers are also lyrically limp—you get choruses like “I’m always going to be about us” or “We’re going to be all right.” It feels like taking the broadest generalities and trying to make them specifically relatable, which is the inverse of what Dashboard was good at. <em>AMAMABAS</em> was definitely their breakout hit, like you said, but the first two albums—<em>The Swiss Army Romance</em> and <em>The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most—</em>had more of a rawness to them that felt particularly intimate, and that intimacy is what’s missing for me on much of <em>Crooked Shadows.</em></p><p dir="ltr">Of the stadium rock numbers, I like “Catch You” the best—it’s got a boppy little hook. But I much prefer the songs that aren’t aiming to fill an arena. The lick on “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQTVpWxu570">Heart Beat Here</a>” is classic Dashboard, infused with just a bit of folk energy that may be leftover from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlRAqkFZk">Twin Forks</a>—the Americana band that Carrabba has fronted since 2011.</p><p dir="ltr">But we need to talk about “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-dR1NtNSLU">Belong</a>”—the collaboration with the EDM DJ group Cash Cash. It’s easily the most jarring song. Dashboard gone dance pop is not something I ever thought I’d live to hear. But the more I listen to it the more it honestly works for me! Do you think I’m insane?</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Nyce: </strong> I’m certainly not one to judge. Cash Cash’s 2013 “Take Me Home,” featuring Bebe Rexha, was a mainstay of my guilty pleasures playlist for longer than I care to admit. It’s interesting to see the group’s take on Dashboard. In a way, “Belong” is an electronic-infused “Hands Down” for the Coachella set. It’s bouncy and optimistic, despite being a bit simplistic as far as love narratives go. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-dR1NtNSLU">The music video for the track</a> features a Dashboard fangirl obsessing over Carrabba. At one point, she begins to project her fantasies onto him, literally, using a mannequin and projector. I was slightly offended, but, to employ that Twitter cliche, <em>I feel seen.</em></p><p dir="ltr">Also, I definitely felt the folk undertones you’re describing with “Heart Beat Here.” It reminded me a little of The Lumineers’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCBSSwgtg4">Ho Hey</a>.”<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCBSSwgtg4"> </a>Overall, this isn’t my favorite Dashboard record, but it was never going to be. I’ve grown up and so has the band: We’re both a lot less angst-ridden. Like you, I wish the earlier songs had more bite, but I found some relief on the latter half of the album.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s true—when I was younger I loved Dashboard with the unbridled fervor only a teen can, and this was always going to be a different sort of experience. Just when I was ready to write <em>Crooked Shadows</em> off as a bit of a let-down—some fun moments, sure, but nothing that spoke to me in that distinctly Dashboard way—the album finishes with a perfect, lovely gem of a song. “Just What To Say” (featuring Chrissy Costanza) is Carrabba at his best, delicately tracing the contours of a familiar feeling, and it’s truly moving. His voice is quiet and wavers a little as he delivers an unadorned lament of trying and falling short:</p><blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">My friends all believe me<br>
When I say I’m busy with pretty big things<br>
I cancel most plans<br>
I hurt someone’s feelings<br>
I feel like I’m starting<br>
And just when I’m starting, I’m starting to stray<br>
And every day, I take a white page<br>
And try very hard to know just what to say</p>
</blockquote><p>This is not the teen angst of the old Dashboard; it’s a heavy, adult melancholy, and it sits with you. “Just What To Say” is the best song on the album, and it proves that Carrabba does still have something to say.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Nyce:</strong> That stanza stood out to me as well—the line about canceling plans is an interesting foil to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr9yJSppiBc">his earlier lyrics about being lonely in an empty apartment</a>. The Carrabba of yesteryear felt isolated; the older one isolates himself. Fans of the older stuff will certainly feel at home with that track. I also enjoyed the mellower “Open My Eyes,” featuring Lindsey Stirling. Like you, I preferred the latter half over the more stadium-rock tracks.</p><p>I’d note this album is relatively short, with only nine songs and around 30 minutes of running time. Here’s one question that I’m still torn on: Is this emo?</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Beck: </strong>Wow. You’re really asking the hard questions here. I don’t … know. Emo was always such a vague and wide-ranging label (and one many emo bands wouldn’t use to describe themselves). It was sort of like beauty (in the eye of the beholder) or porn (you knew it when you saw it). For me, the genre feels very bounded in time, a certain quality distinctive to the late ’90s and 2000s. Even the contemporary bands and singers I like who have been dubbed part of the emo revival—Julien Baker, Hop Along—don’t <em>feel </em>emo to me. Influenced by the genre, sure, but I think the door to that era shut a while ago. </p><p dir="ltr">By this logic the new Dashboard album poses a taxonomic conundrum—Carrabba’s voice still has that emo flavor, and Dashboard Confessional is <em>the </em>canonical emo band, but the new songs feel very modern. The band seems to be aiming at something a little different with this album. So I’m going to say no. Not quite emo.</p><p dir="ltr">If you had to pick, would you say <em>Crooked Shadows</em> is emo or no?</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Nyce:</strong> I’d have to say no.<strong> </strong>With this album, Dashboard drifts further from that genre it came to define. And I’m not so sure that plays to Carrabba’s strengths. Still, <em>Crooked Shadows</em> has its moments, even if it doesn’t force the kind of introspection their earlier records do.</p><p dir="ltr">I’m planning on attending the band’s <em>Crooked Shadows</em> tour this spring, and am very interested in how these new songs mesh with the old ones on a set list. One could imagine it being a very disjointed experience.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Beck:</strong> I know you are—I’m going with you! It might end up being a strange mishmash of the old and the new, but Dashboard has always been great live, because Carrabba treats the audience with such earnest devotion. I’m really looking forward to it, and just so you know, I am absolutely, positively 100 percent going to cry.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedCaroline Mimbs Nycehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/caroline-mimbs-nyce/?utm_source=feedTheo Wargo / GettyDashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba performs in New York City in August 2017Is Dashboard Confessional Still Emo?2018-02-12T10:56:49-05:002018-02-13T10:48:14-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-552980Two Atlantic writers discuss the new album, <em>Crooked Shadows</em>, and how the band’s sound has evolved since its eight-year hiatus.<p>Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of <em>The New York Times Book Review</em>, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”</p><p>For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780684807614">Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin.</a> “While I read that book, I knew not <em>everything</em> there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”</p><p>Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.</p><p>“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”</p><p>The “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve">forgetting curve</a>,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.</p><p>Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.</p><p>In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.</p><p>Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21764755">as one study puts it</a>. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t <em>need</em> to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.</p><p>With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.</p><p>Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:</p><blockquote>
<p>This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.</p>
</blockquote><p>(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)</p><p>“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.</p><p>It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne <a href="http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7729/6532">found</a> that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.</p><p>People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American <a href="https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/the-american-diet-34-gigabytes-a-day/?mtrref=www.google.com">encountered</a> 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “<a href="https://themorningnews.org/article/binge-reading-disorder">Binge-Reading Disorder</a>,” an article for <em>The Morning News, </em>Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”</p><p>Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.”</p><p>The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.</p><p>Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”</p><p>People might do that when they study, or read something for work, but it seems unlikely that in their leisure time they’re going to take notes on <em>Gilmore Girls </em>to quiz themselves later. “You could be seeing and hearing, but you might not be noticing and listening,” Sana says. “Which is, I think, most of the time what we do.”</p><p>Still, not all memories that wander are lost. Some of them may just be lurking, inaccessible, until the right cue pops them back up—perhaps a pre-episode “Previously on <em>Gilmore Girls</em>” recap, or a conversation with a friend about a book you’ve both read. Memory is “all associations, essentially,” Sana says.</p><p>That may explain why Paul and others remember the context in which they read a book without remembering its contents. Paul has kept a “book of books,” or “Bob,” since she was in high school—an analog form of externalized memory—in which she writes down every book she reads. “Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781627796316">My Life With Bob</a>, </em>a book she wrote about her book of books. “Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time.”</p><p>In a piece for <em>The New Yorker</em> called “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-curse-of-reading-and-forgetting">The Curse of Reading and Forgetting</a>,” Ian Crouch writes, “reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?”</p><p>To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s seasons by the art that filled them—the spring of romance novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.</p><p>Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains—they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.</p><p>“It’d be really cool if memories were just clean—information comes in and now you have a memory for that fact,” Horvath says. “But in truth, all memories are everything.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedJohn Frederick Peto / Getty"Discarded Treasures"Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read2018-01-26T12:57:00-05:002018-01-26T14:04:00-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-551603... and the movies and TV shows we watch<p>Edward Cullen. Chuck Bass. Lloyd Dobler. Spike from <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em>. That guy from <em>Love Actually</em> with the sign. The lead singers of emo bands with their brooding lyrics. Many of the romantic heroes that made me swoon in my youth followed a pattern and, like a <em>Magic Eye</em> picture, only with a little distance did the shape of it pop out to me. All of these characters in some way crossed, or at least blurred, the lines of consent, aggressively pursuing women with little or no regard for their desires. But these characters’ actions, and those of countless other leading men across the pop-culture landscape, were more likely to be portrayed as charming than scary.</p><p>Romance often involves a bit of pursuit—someone has to make a move, after all. And there’s certainly a spectrum of pursuit: Sometimes supposedly romantic gestures in pop culture veer toward the horrendous or illegal; sometimes they’re just a bit creepy or overzealous. But revisiting some of these fictional love stories can leave one with the understanding that intrusive attention is proof of men’s passion, and something women should welcome. In a number of cases, male characters who were acknowledged to have gone too far—by, for example, actually forcing themselves on women—were quickly forgiven, or their actions compartmentalized and forgotten.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>I grew up watching movies in which women found it flattering when their pursuers <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Y8tFQ01OY">showed up uninvited </a>to hold a boombox under their window, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE71I4X9hWQ">broke into their bedrooms</a> to watch them sleep, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7u6bMBlCXw">confessed their feelings</a> via posterboard while their love interest’s husband<strong> </strong>sat in the next room. So I found it flattering, too. I sang along with The Killers’ “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-mW_0TUSy4">Change Your Mind</a>” (“If the answer is no, can I change your mind?”) and Fall Out Boy’s “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVPeMQBdkKg">7 Minutes in Heaven</a>” (“I keep telling myself I’m not the desperate type, but you’ve got me looking in through blinds”) without a second thought about what the lyrics implied.</p><p>Allegations of sexual harassment have been pouring out of the entertainment industry, among others, in recent months. But while predatory male behavior has been condoned and covered up behind the scenes, it’s also been glorified on screen and on the page and on the radio. As my colleague Lenika Cruz put it to me: “Rape culture, actually, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAD2_MVMUlE">is all around</a>.” The narratives of a culture help to set its norms. Research has already found that romantic comedies can <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/romantic-comedies-where-stalking-meets-love/460179/?utm_source=feed">normalize stalking behavior</a>. It’s not difficult, then, to imagine that toxic love stories can also normalize coercion. That they can make people—women, especially—question when and whether their boundaries have really been violated, when they should be flattered and when they should be afraid.</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>It’s worth beginning with the more shocking examples of how pop culture condones and redeems violating behavior: In a number of cases, sexual assault is treated as the start of a love story. On <em>General Hospital</em>, the longest-running soap opera in production, the tale of the “supercouple” Luke and Laura started in an October 1979 episode—when Luke raped Laura at the disco where they both worked. Eventually the show began recalling the incident <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TMlyAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT44&amp;lpg=PT44&amp;dq=general+hospital+rape+amnesia&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=_Q945HlWce&amp;sig=LTsP0_ZlxV1p7Yo5GP-k3wawhqM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiWn6X12-bXAhVhQt8KHUWUCekQ6AEITDAF#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">as a “seduction”</a> rather than a rape, and the two fell for each other. They later married in a record-making 1981 episode watched by 30 million people. The rape was “romanticized to my great regret,” Anthony Geary, the actor who played Luke,<a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-tony-geary-20150727-story.html"> has said</a>. But in the same interview he described Luke as “a classically romantic character, a classic anti-hero.” <em>General Hospital </em>portrayed sexual assault not as a<strong> </strong>definitive shattering of trust, but as a foundation on which a relationship can be built—a model embraced by other shows and films as well.</p><p>For example, in the 1982 sci-fi classic <em>Blade Runner</em>, the protagonist Rick Deckard at one point <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOfvq5ZO-Qw">forces himself</a> on an android named Rachael. But the moment is portrayed as romantic—it’s even soundtracked with a sexy ’80s saxophone. Casey Cipriani <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/10/12/blade_runner_2049_makes_a_love_story_out_of_a_rape_scene.html">at <em>Slate </em>writes</a> of the film’s 2017 sequel,<em> Blade Runner 2049,</em> that “a big part of the new <em>Blade Runner</em>’s plot relies on the belief that Deckard and Rachael fell in love in the first, [but] their ‘love’ is the result of a coercive sex scene.” Similarly, in the first season of <em>Game of Thrones</em>, the relationship between Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo—which is portrayed as a great love, one through which Daenerys eventually comes into her own as a ruler—begins with a wedding night <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrht8mroFM4">on which the teenage girl cries</a> and tries unsuccessfully to keep Drogo from undressing her. (This is a departure from the book’s depiction of that scene.)</p><p>The serial nature of television in particular means many shows suffer from a kind of assault amnesia when it’s no longer convenient for a character who once raped or attempted rape to be seen as a villain. On <em>Gossip Girl,</em> a show that permeated the culture for late-’00s teens like few others, predatory behavior functions as a black mark on a character’s past that’s simply erased when the series wants to change his arc. The trust-fund playboy Chuck Bass rings in the show by trying to force himself on two girls in the very first episode—<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hXnXcwnrp4&amp;t=2m49s">Serena</a>, and Jenny, a freshman girl. Within episodes, the incidents seem to have faded from the show’s memory. Chuck morphs from an antagonist into a romantic lead.</p><p>Well, sort of. Chuck’s behavior over the course of his fan-favorite romance with Blair Waldorf often tipped over from sexy into coercive, or downright emotionally abusive. In Season 1, after the show’s titular blog reveals that Blair slept with both Chuck and another boy, she turns to Chuck for comfort. He responds <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik9am60q6hM">thusly</a>:</p><blockquote>
<p>You held a certain fascination when you were beautiful, delicate, and untouched. But now you’re like one of the Arabians my father used to own: rode hard and put away wet. I don’t want you anymore and I can’t see why anyone else would.</p>
</blockquote><p>That moment isn’t played for romance, but neither is it much of an impediment to the unfolding of their love story. By the end of the season, Chuck is wooing Blair by alluding to her in a toast at his father’s wedding. “In the face of true love you don’t just give up, even if the object of your affection is begging you to,” he says, staring at her. The series ends with Chuck and Blair’s wedding.</p><p>Though rape is frequently used as a device to add drama, shows often don’t deal with the fallout for a relationship realistically, or at all. On <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em>, another fan-favorite character, the vampire Spike, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGWhEgjdLeM">tries to rape Buffy</a> in an attempt to force her to admit she loves him. “I’m going to make you feel it,” he says. As the series continues, Spike’s character remains beloved: He earns a soul (literally—as a vampire he didn’t have one before) and resumes an emotionally intimate, if not clearly sexual, relationship with Buffy.</p><p>Even more pervasive than the redeemed rapist is the romantic hero whose efforts at seduction look more like harassment. In the <em>Twilight </em>series<em>,</em> the brooding vampire Edward Cullen not only breaks into his love interest Bella’s house in the first book to watch her sleep, but later on, in the third book, he also disassembles her car engine to keep her from leaving her house. But readers are supposed to see it as a protective gesture: He did it because he <em>loves </em>her, because he wants her to be safe.</p><p>Sometimes badgering is packaged as confident flirtation. The love story of Meredith Grey and Derek—Doctor “McDreamy” himself—on the medical drama <em>Grey’s Anatomy</em> begins with workplace harassment. “I’ve been wondering to myself,” Meredith <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGnA9l2v6YY">says in an early episode</a>, “why are you so hell-bent on getting me to go out with you? You know you’re my boss. You know it’s against the rules. You know I keep saying no.” McDreamy responds, “Well, it’s fun isn’t it?” (The two go on to marry and have a family together.)</p><p>These scenes all add up to give the impression that romance requires a man’s desire, but not<strong> </strong>necessarily a woman’s. For her, the romance is mined from the fact that she is desired. At the end of the 1989 romantic comedy <em>Say Anything,</em> some time after the protagonist Lloyd Dobler held a boombox under the heroine Diane Court’s window in an attempt to win her back after their breakup, Diane <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ib_lBGuoUQ">finally comes to tell Lloyd she needs him</a>. “One question,” he says. “Are you here because you need someone or because you need me?” He allows for a moment the possibility that Diane’s desires matter. The music swells, and then: “Forget it,” he says, before he goes in for the kiss. “I don’t care.” Of course he doesn’t.</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>In music, too, there’s no shortage of songs that glorify a man’s threatening overtures, from “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFJ7ie_yGU">Baby, It’s Cold Outside</a>” (“Say, what’s in this drink?”<em>)</em>, to “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOGaugKpzs">Every Breath You Take</a>” (“I’ll be watching you”<em>),</em> to “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfjtpp90lu8">Blame It (On the Alcohol)</a>” (“I hear you saying what you won’t do / But you know we’re probably gon’ do”). And of course, there’s Robin Thicke’s literal anthem for the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU">Blurred Lines</a>” I’m talking about (“I know you want it ... Just let me liberate you”).</p><p>Emo—the genre in which I found most of the romantic anthems of my youth—is a particularly potent brew of romance and violence. While many emo songs are full of longing and daydreams of unrequited affection, their tales of intense pursuit also sometimes accelerate into explicit aggression toward women when things don’t go the narrator’s way. And emo was an overwhelmingly male-dominated genre. “Wear me like a locket around your throat / I’ll weigh you down, I’ll watch you choke / You look so good in blue,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW0BFc6VBbo">one Fall Out Boy song</a> goes. In “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvzHyHgc4lA">Jude Law and a Semester Abroad</a>,” Brand New’s singer laments, “Even if her plane crashes tonight / She’ll find some way to disappoint me / By not burning in the wreckage / Or drowning at the bottom of the sea.”</p><p>But even the love songs that weren’t explicitly violent, the ones that put cartoon hearts in my eyes as I listened to my Walkman on the school bus, told a tale where love meant never having to take no for an answer. “If you only once would let me, only just one time,” the singer of Jimmy Eat World begs in the song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY89XG0lmhI">Work</a>.” (“Work and play, they’re never okay, to mix the way we do,” it continues.) The Dashboard Confessional song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGeh43A_4H0">As Lovers Go</a>” starts with: “She said ‘I've gotta be honest, you’re wasting your time if you’re fishing around here.’” After this polite rebuff, the singer does not stop his pursuit. “I’ll belong to you, if you just let me through,” he says. “This is easy as lovers go, so don’t complicate it by hesitating.”</p><p><em>Don’t complicate it by hesitating</em> could be the slogan for rape culture. Don’t hesitate in giving men what they want, don’t complicate our love stories by worrying about consent.</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>Recent accusations of sexual assault and harassment—including against the actor <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/ed-westwick-third-accuser-sexual-assault-rachel-eck">Ed Westwick</a>, who played Chuck Bass, and <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/two-alleged-victims-of-brand-news-jesse-lacey-detail-years-of-sexual-exploitation-of-minors/">Jesse Lacey</a>, the lead singer of Brand New, and so many others—have pushed me to take another look at the love stories that shaped me as I grew up. Obviously, Westwick, who <a href="http://deadline.com/2017/11/ed-westwick-third-woman-accusations-sexual-assault-1202209295/">has denied</a> the rape allegations against him, is not the same as Chuck Bass. And misogynistic song lyrics don’t prove that Lacey—<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/11/13/563807010/brand-new-frontman-jesse-lacey-apologizes-for-sexual-misconduct-postpones-tour">who has apologized</a> without admitting to any specific wrongdoing—mistreated young women. But neither can I call these parallels<strong> </strong>a complete coincidence. Both the products and the people of the entertainment industry have been shaped by a culture of harassment when it comes to women and children. And if the actions of the people in the industry lay shrouded in shadows for a long time, the products have always been there for us to see and hear.</p><p>The plots that play out on screen play out in the world, too. Harassers <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/harvey-weinstein-apology/542193/?utm_source=feed">apologize</a>, and are allowed the chance for <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/weinstein-sex-addiction/542619/?utm_source=feed">rehabilitation</a>. Alleged incidents of sexual misconduct in a man’s history are <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/listening-to-what-trumps-accusers-have-told-us">conveniently</a> forgotten <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/reckoning-with-bill-clintons-sex-crimes/545729/?utm_source=feed">when it’s uncomfortable</a>. Our romantic cultural touchstones find parallels in real life, on the grand scale and the small.</p><p>Take, for example, the story of an anonymous young woman <a href="http://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355">who described an </a>upsetting date with the comedian Aziz Ansari, during which she said he repeatedly pressured her for sex. <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2018/01/14/aziz-ansari-sexual-assault-accusation?utm_source=tftw">In his response</a>, Ansari said the incident “by all indications was completely consensual”; his accuser said she “felt violated.” While observers disagree about how to characterize the encounter, many have recognized it as an example of how differently men and women are taught to view consent. As Anna North <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/16/16894722/aziz-ansari-grace-babe-me-too">wrote in <em>Vox</em> </a>of the Ansari episode: “Boys learn at a young age, from pop culture, their elders, and their peers, that it’s normal to have to convince a woman to have sex, and that repeated small violations of her boundaries are an acceptable way to do so—perhaps even the only way.”</p><p>When living out their own romantic narratives, people often, consciously or not, compare them to the love stories they’ve already been told. When tales like these pile up, they can<strong> </strong>leach into our minds and relationships like radiation. It has been hard to realize, and harder still to admit, how much my own desires sprouted up twisted by the poison they absorbed. The confessional, vulnerable nature of emo songs made me feel like my headphones gave me a direct line to boys’ hearts. They craved the chase, I thought, and then, so did I.</p><p>It’s so easy when you’re young to mold yourself in the shape of your fantasies. When I was a teen, my desire to be romantically pursued was so strong that when I spotted a guy I liked ahead of me in the hallways of my high school, rather than catching up to talk, I would pretend not to see him and get ahead of him in the crowd, to see if <em>he </em>would approach <em>me.</em> How much of that was teenage awkwardness and a lack of self-confidence, and how much of it was the conviction that I was more desirable if I appeared to be passive and oblivious? How can you dig the roots of your desires out from the soil they sprouted in without killing them entirely?</p><p>My colleague Megan Garber has described <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/its-rom-coms-fault-too/505928/?utm_source=feed">our current era</a> as “a time in which feminism and Puritanism and sex positivity and sex-shaming and progress and its absence have mingled to make everything, to borrow Facebook’s pleasant euphemism, Complicated.” Our culture is beginning to complicate things, to question the value of romanticizing stories where one person chases another, or wears her down, or drags her along against her will. But recognizing the flaws in these ideas doesn’t make them go away. They still float in the spaces between people; they are the sludge through which we have to swim as we try to see each other clearly.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedTim Mosenfelder / Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty / 20th Century Fox / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic When Pop Culture Sells Dangerous Myths About Romance2018-01-17T11:19:00-05:002018-01-17T12:09:05-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-549749Entertainment glorifying or excusing predatory male behavior is everywhere—from songs about “blurred lines” to TV shows where rapists marry their victims.<p>On Tuesday, the White House physician Ronny L. Jackson announced the results of President Donald Trump’s annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. After a four-hour exam on Friday, Jackson found that “all clinical data indicates that the president is currently very healthy and that he will remain so for the duration of his presidency.”</p><p>“He would benefit from a diet that is lower in fat and carbohydrates, and from a routine exercise regimen,” Jackson said. And Trump’s cholesterol is a little high. But he’s taking medication for that, and otherwise “his cardiac health is excellent.”</p><p>“He’s fit for duty,” Jackson said. “I think he will remain fit for duty for the remainder of this term, and even for the remainder of another term if he’s elected.”</p><p>This glowing bill of health is remarkable, not only for a man of Trump’s age—71, the oldest president ever to have served—but for a man of Trump’s habits. Trump has been reported to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/us/politics/donald-trump-diet.html?mtrref=www.google.com">regularly eat junk food</a>—and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/trump-eats/547355/?utm_source=feed">a lot of it</a>. He <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/trump-is-relatively-unfit-to-serve/521121/?utm_source=feed">avoids exercise</a> other than golf, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/trumps-unfitness/526677/?utm_source=feed">has espoused</a> the strange and incorrect view that exercise depletes the body’s energy. He also doesn’t get much sleep (leading to lots of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/what-trump-tweets-while-america-sleeps/503141/?utm_source=feed">late-night tweets</a>). Some have even <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/31/chronic-sleep-deprivation-impairing-trump-brain-performance/102344570/">speculated</a> from afar that Trump’s lack of sleep might be affecting his job performance.</p><p>Jackson acknowledged all of these bad habits. He said he was working with the president to improve his diet and exercise, with the goal being for Trump to lose 10 to 15 pounds in the next year. Jackson also said the president sleeps four to five hours a night and has “probably been that way his whole life.”</p><p>But “he’s very healthy despite those things,” Jackson said. “Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet ... he might live to be 200 years old.” Of Trump’s sleep habits, the doctor added, “that’s probably one of the reasons why he’s been successful.”</p><p>The atmosphere at press briefing, which was live-streamed from the White House, was almost incredulous, perhaps because so much ink and so many pixels have been spilled on the unhealthy things the president does. In a lengthy Q&amp;A portion, reporters asked Jackson if he was withholding any results from the physical, or if the president was on any medications he didn’t disclose, or even if there was anything the president asked Jackson not to mention. Jackson said no.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Trump also underwent a screening for cognitive impairment—the Montreal Cognitive Assessment—at his own request. He is apparently the first president ever to have taken such a test during a routine physical. Jackson said he didn’t think it was necessary, and he would not have administered the screening had the president not asked for it. He indicated that media <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/">speculation</a> about <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/donald-trump-brain-health">whether Trump</a> is in some way <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2017/12/07/donald-trump-brain-specialist-disease/">neurologically impaired</a> played some role in Trump’s decision to ask for the test.</p><p>But Trump scored 30 out of 30 on the assessment, making him “mentally very, very sharp, very intact,” Jackson said.</p><p>The audience seemed surprised to hear that as well, asking multiple follow-up questions about the cognitive exam, whether it definitively ruled out any kind of cognitive impairment, and whether it could have missed anything. “If he had some type of mental, cognitive issue ... this test is sensitive enough, it would pick up on it,” Jackson said.</p><p>That such a straightforward result would yield such a media circus was bizarre—so many of the questions cast doubt on what was said. But Jackson—who also served as the personal physician to Barack Obama—was very forthcoming in his briefing, even including his opinion of personal interactions he’s had with the president. He noted that Trump seems stable, and even not particularly stressed. Trump has always seemed “very sharp and ... very articulate when he speaks to me,” Jackson said.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersTrump Is Surprisingly Healthy2018-01-16T18:23:00-05:002018-01-17T09:06:59-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-550628The president’s physical and mental health both appeared excellent in a recent exam, despite reportedly poor lifestyle habits.<p>Astrology is a meme, and it’s spreading in that blooming, unfurling way that memes do. On social media, astrologers and astrology meme machines amass tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, people joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as ...” literally anything: <a href="https://scared-aquarius.tumblr.com/post/167954160729/signs-as-cat-breeds">cat breeds</a>, <a href="https://astrosugartea.tumblr.com/post/166300130534/the-signs-oscar-wilde-quotes">Oscar Wilde quotes,</a> <a href="http://astrorhea.tumblr.com/post/168195115455/the-signs-as-stranger-things-characters">Stranger Things characters</a><a href="https://astrosugartea.tumblr.com/post/166300130534/the-signs-oscar-wilde-quotes">,</a> <a href="https://libralovelies.tumblr.com/post/168161256791/the-signs-as-types-of-french-fries">types of french fries.</a> In online publications, <a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/59wz75/daily-horoscope-december-18-2017">daily,</a> <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/madame-clairevoyant-horoscopes-for-the-week-of-december-18.html">weekly,</a> and <a href="http://www.elle.com/horoscopes/monthly/">monthly</a> horoscopes, and <a href="http://www.refinery29.com/2017/12/185005/tv-characters-zodiac-signs">zodiac-themed</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/delaneystrunk/why-the-hell-are-pisces-so-sensitive-like-just-chil?utm_term=.rrwlzPXRP#.gryyqNngN">listicles</a> flourish.</p><p style="background-color: #333; color: #fff; padding: 12px 24px;"><iframe frameborder="no" height="20" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/398462754&amp;inverse=true&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_user=true" style="background-color: #333" width="100%"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">To hear more feature stories, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=feed" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">see our full list</a> or <a href="https://goo.gl/5sVYXm" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">get the Audm iPhone app.</a> </i></p><p>This isn’t the first moment astrology’s had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years. More recently, the New Age movement of the 1960s and ’70s came with a heaping helping of the zodiac. (Some also refer to the New Age as the “Age of Aquarius”—the 2,000-year period after the Earth is said to move into the Aquarius sign.)</p><p>In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines—it “went back to being a little bit more in the background,” says Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles. “Then there’s something that’s happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.”</p><p>Many people I spoke to for this piece said they had a sense that the stigma attached to astrology, while it still exists, had receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people.</p><p>“Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” says Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of J. Walter Thompson’s innovation group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends.</p><p>Callie Beusman, a senior editor at <em>Broadly</em>, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of <em>The Cut</em>, says a typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before.</p><p>In some ways, astrology is perfectly suited for the internet age. There’s a low barrier to entry, and nearly endless depths to plumb if you feel like falling down a Google research hole. The availability of more in-depth information online has given this cultural wave of astrology a certain erudition—more jokes about Saturn returns, fewer “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” pickup lines.</p><p>A quick primer: Astrology is not a science; there’s <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232348477_An_empirical_test_of_the_astrological_theory_of_personality">no evidence</a> that one’s zodiac sign actually correlates to personality. But the system has its own sort of logic. Astrology ascribes meaning to the placement of the sun, the moon, and the planets within 12 sections of the sky—the signs of the zodiac. You likely know your sun sign, the most famous zodiac sign, even if you’re not an astrology buff. It’s based on where the sun was on your birthday. But the placement of the moon and each of the other planets at the time and location of your birth adds additional shades to the picture of you painted by your “birth chart.”</p><p>What horoscopes are supposed to do is give you information about what the planets are doing right now, and in the future, and how all that affects each sign. “Think of the planets as a cocktail party,” explains Susan Miller, the popular astrologer who founded the <em>Astrology Zone</em> website. “You might have three people talking together, two may be over in the corner arguing, Venus and Mars may be kissing each other. I have to make sense of those conversations that are happening each month for you.”</p><p>“Astrologers are always trying to boil down these giant concepts into digestible pieces of knowledge,” says Nicholas. “The kids these days and their memes are like the perfect context for astrology.”</p><p>Astrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns through the shorthand of the planets and zodiac symbols. And that shorthand works well online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication.</p><p>“Let me state first that I consider astrology a cultural or psychological phenomenon,” not a scientific one, Bertram Malle, a social cognitive scientist at Brown University, told me in an email. But “full-fledged astrology”—that goes beyond newspaper-style sun-sign horoscopes—“provides a powerful vocabulary to capture not only personality and temperament but also life’s challenges and opportunities. To the extent that one simply learns this vocabulary, it may be appealing as a rich way of representing (not explaining or predicting) human experiences and life events, and identifying some possible paths of coping.”</p><p class="dropcap">People tend to turn to astrology in times of stress. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886982900265">A small 1982 study</a> by the psychologist Graham Tyson found that “people who consult astrologers” did so in response to stressors in their lives—particularly stress “linked to the individual’s social roles and to his or her relationships,” Tyson wrote. “Under conditions of high stress, the individual is prepared to use astrology as a coping device even though under low-stress conditions he does not believe in it.”</p><p>According to American Psychological Association survey data, since 2014, Millennials have been the most stressed generation, and also the generation most likely to say their stress has increased in the past year since 2010. Millennials and Gen Xers have been significantly more stressed than older generations since 2012. And Americans as a whole have seen increased stress because of the political tumult since the 2016 presidential election. The <a href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2017/state-nation.pdf">2017 edition</a> of the APA’s survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they were significantly stressed about their country’s future. Fifty-six percent of people said reading the news stresses them out, and Millennials and Gen Xers were significantly more likely than older people to say so. Lately that news often deals with political infighting, climate change, global crises, and the threat of nuclear war. If stress makes astrology look shinier, it’s not surprising that more seem to be drawn to it now.</p><p>Nicholas’s horoscopes are evidence of this. She has around 1 million monthly readers online, and recently snagged a book deal—one of four new mainstream astrology guidebooks sold in a two-month period in summer 2017, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Anna Paustenbach, Nicholas’s editor at HarperOne, told me in an email that Nicholas is “at the helm of a resurgence of astrology.” She thinks this is partly because Nicholas’s horoscopes are explicitly political. On September 6, the day after the Trump administration announced it was rescinding DACA—the deferred-action protection program for undocumented immigrants—Nicholas sent out her typical newsletter for the upcoming full moon. <a href="http://mailchi.mp/chaninicholas/new-moon-in-taurus-affirmation-horoscopes-for-the-week-of-april-24th-906569?e=b22fdcb5ab">It read</a>, in part:</p><blockquote>
<p>The full moon in Pisces ... may open the floodgates of our feelings. May help us to empathize with others ... May we use this full moon to continue to dream up, and actively work toward, creating a world where white supremacy has been abolished.</p>
</blockquote><p>Astrology offers those in crisis the comfort of imagining a better future, a tangible reminder of that clichéd truism that is nonetheless hard to remember when you’re in the thick of it: This too shall pass.</p><p>In 2013, when Sandhya was 32 years old, she downloaded the Astrology Zone app, looking for a road map. She felt lonely, and unappreciated at her nonprofit job in Washington, D.C., and she was going out drinking four or five times a week. “I was in the cycle of constantly being out, trying to escape,” she says.</p><p>She wanted to know when things would get better and Astrology Zone had an answer. Jupiter, “<a href="https://www.astrologyzone.com/learn-astrology/the-planets/jupiter/">the planet of good fortune</a>,” would move into Sandhya’s zodiac sign, Leo, in one year’s time, and remain there for a year. Sandhya remembers reading that if she cut clutter out of her life now, she’d reap the rewards when Jupiter arrived.</p><p>So Sandhya spent the next year making room for Jupiter. (She requested that we not publish her last name because she works as an attorney and doesn’t want her clients to know the details of her personal life.) She started staying home more often, cooking for herself, applying for jobs, and going on more dates. “I definitely distanced myself from two or three friends who I didn’t feel had good energy when I hung around them,” she says. “And that helped significantly.”</p><p>Jupiter entered Leo on July 16, 2014. That same July, Sandhya was offered a new job. That December, Sandhya met the man she would go on to marry. “My life changed dramatically,” she says. “Part of it is that a belief in something makes it happen. But I followed what the app was saying. So I credit some of it to this Jupiter belief.”</p><p>Humans are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/?utm_source=feed">narrative creatures</a>, constantly explaining their lives and selves by weaving together the past, present, and future (in the form of goals and expectations). Monisha Pasupathi, a developmental psychologist who studies narrative at the University of Utah, says that while she lends no credence to astrology, it “provides [people] a very clear frame for that explanation.”</p><p>It does give one a pleasing orderly sort of feeling, not unlike alphabetizing a library, to take life’s random events and emotions and slot them into helpfully labeled shelves. This guy isn’t texting me back because Mercury retrograde probably kept him from getting the message. I take such a long time to make decisions because my Mars is in Taurus. My boss will finally recognize all my hard work when Jupiter enters my tenth house. A combination of stress and uncertainty about the future is an ailment for which astrology can seem like the perfect balm.</p><p>Sandhya says she turns to astrology looking for help in times of despair, “when I’m like ‘Someone tell me the future is gonna be okay.’” Reading her horoscope was like flipping ahead in her own story.</p><p>“I’m always a worrier,” she says. “I’m one of those people who, once I start getting into a book, I skip ahead and I read the end. I don’t like cliffhangers, I don’t like suspense. I just need to know what’s gonna happen. I have a story in my head. I was just hoping certain things would happen in my life, and I wanted to see if I am lucky enough for them to happen.”</p><p>Now that they have happened, “I haven’t been reading [my horoscope] as much,” she says, “and I think it’s because I’m in a happy place right now.”</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="A woman's face hovers over an Earth surrounded by Zodiac signs. A constellation of stars forms the shape of her brain." height="540" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/01/AstrologySpot/965019ab5.jpg" width="960"><figcaption class="credit">Maura Dwyer</figcaption></figure><p class="dropcap">For some, astrology’s predictions function like Dumbo’s feather—a comforting magic to hold onto until you realize you could fly on your own all along. But it’s the ineffable mystical sparkle of the feather—gentler and less draining than the glow of a screen—that makes people reach for it in the first place.</p><p>People are starting to get sick of a life lived so intensely on the grid. They <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/">wish for more anonymity online</a>. They’re experiencing fatigue <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/70696-as-e-book-sales-decline-digital-fatigue-grows.html">with ebooks</a>, with <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/10/the-unbearable-exhaustion-of-dating-apps/505184/?utm_source=feed">dating apps</a>, with <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/27/poll-most-teens-have-taken-social-media-break/100982708/">social media</a>. They’re craving something else in this era of quantified selves, and tracked locations, and indexed answers to every possible question. Except, perhaps the questions of who you really are, and what life has in store for you.</p><p>Ruby Warrington is a lifestyle writer whose New Age guidebook <em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062437112&amp;aff=hcweb">Material Girl, Mystical World</a> </em>came out in May 2017—just ahead of the wave of astrology book sales this summer. She also runs a mystical esoterica website, <em><a href="https://the-numinous.com/">The Numinous,</a></em> a word which Merriam-Webster defines as meaning “supernatural or mysterious,” but which Warrington defines on her website as “that which is unknown, or unknowable.”</p><p>“I think that almost as a counterbalance to the fact that we live in such a quantifiable and meticulously organized world, there is a desire to connect to and tap into that numinous part of ourselves,” Warrington says. “I see astrology as a language of symbols that describes those parts of the human experience that we don’t necessarily have equations and numbers and explanations for.”</p><p>J. Walter Thompson’s intelligence group released a trend report in 2016 called “<a href="https://www.jwtintelligence.com/trend-reports/unreality/">Unreality</a>” that says much the same thing: “We are increasingly turning to unreality as a form of escape and a way to search for other kinds of freedom, truth and meaning,” it reads. “What emerges is an appreciation for magic and spirituality, the knowingly unreal, and the intangible aspects of our lives that defy big data and the ultra-transparency of the web.” This sort of reactionary cultural 180 has happened before—after the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality and the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantic movement found people turning toward intuition, nature, and the supernatural. It seems we may be at a similar turning point. <em>New York </em>magazine even used the seminal Romantic painting <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog">Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog</a> </em>to illustrate Andrew Sullivan’s recent anti-technology essay, <a href="http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-my-distraction-sickness-and-yours.html">“I Used to Be a Human Being.”</a></p><p>JWT and another trend-forecasting group, WGSN, in its report “Millennials: New Spirituality,” lump astrology in with other New Age mystical trends that have caught on with young people in recent years: <a href="https://psmag.com/news/why-are-young-people-so-into-healing-crystals">healing crystals</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/tune-in-and-chill-out-what-are-sound-baths-and-why-you-should-try-one/2017/05/02/e74c697c-2b7c-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?utm_term=.510b94bbf9aa">sound baths</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/style/tarot-cards-dior.html?mtrref=www.google.com&amp;gwh=F9263104DCBB94A324FF13FE9D88590E&amp;gwt=pay">tarot</a>, among others.</p><p>“I think it’s become generally less acceptable to just arbitrarily shit on things as like ‘that’s not rational, or that’s stupid because that’s not fact,’” says Nicole Leffel, a 28-year-old software engineer who lives in New York.</p><p>Bugbee, the editor-in-chief of <em>The Cut,</em> noticed this shift a couple years ago. “I could just tell that people were sick of a certain kind of snarky tone,” she said. Up to that point, the site had been running slightly irreverent horoscopes with gifs meant to encapsulate the week’s mood for each sign. But Bugbee realized “that people wanted sincerity more than anything. So we just kind of went full sincere with [the horoscopes], and that’s when we saw real interest happen.”</p><p class="dropcap">But a sincere burgeoning interest in astrology doesn’t mean people are wholesale abandoning rationality for more mystical beliefs. Nicholas Campion, a historian of astrology, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-actually-believe-in-astrology-71192">points out</a> that the question of whether people “believe” in astrology is both impossible to answer, and not really a useful question to ask. People might say they don’t “believe” in astrology, but still identify with their zodiac sign. They may like to read their horoscope, but don’t change their behavior based on what it says. There is more nuance than this statistic allows for.</p><p>Many mainstream examinations of astrology as a trend are <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-are-horoscopes-still-thing-180957701/">deeply concerned</a> with <a href="https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-believing-in-astrology-is-not-as-harmless-as-you-th-1595802206">debunking</a>. They like to trot out the National Science Foundation survey that measures whether <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-7/public-knowledge-about-s-t/pseudoscience">people think astrology is scientific</a>, and remind readers that it’s not. Which, it’s not. But that’s not really the point.</p><p>While there are surely some people who blindly accept astrology as fact and view it as on par with a discipline like biology, that doesn’t seem to be the case among many of the young adults who are fueling this renaissance of the zodiac. The people I spoke to for this piece often referred to astrology as a tool, or a kind of language—one that, for many, is more metaphorical than literal.</p><p>“Astrology is a system that looks at cycles, and we use the language of planets,” says Alec Verkuilen Brogan, a 29-year-old chiropractic student based in the Bay Area who has also studied astrology for 10 years. “It’s not like these planets are literally going around and being like ‘Now, I'm going to do this.’ It’s a language to speak to the seasons of life.”</p><p>Michael Stevens, a 27-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, was in the quarter-life crisis season of life around the time of the total solar eclipse in August this year. “Traditionally, I’m a skeptic,” he says. “I’m a hard-core, like Dana Scully from <em>X-Files </em>type of person. And then shit started to happen in life.” Around the time of the eclipse, in the course of his advertising work, he cold-called Susan Miller of <em>Astrology Zone</em>, to ask if she would put some ads on her site.</p><p>She was annoyed, he says, that he called her at the end of the month, which is when she writes her famously lengthy horoscopes. But then she asked him for his sign—Sagittarius. “And she’s like, ‘Oh, okay, this new moon’s rough for you.’” They talked about work and relationship troubles. (Miller doesn’t remember having this conversation specifically, but says “I’m always nice to the people who cold-call. It sounds totally like me.”)</p><p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232487874_Why_people_perceive_horoscopes_as_being_true_A_review">Studies have shown</a> that if you write a generic personality description and tell someone it applies to them, they’re likely to perceive it as accurate—whether that’s in the form of a description of their zodiac sign or something else.</p><p>Stevens says he could’ve potentially read into his conversation with Miller in this way. “She’s like ‘You’re going through a lot right now,’” he says. “Who isn’t? It’s 2017. ”</p><p>Still, he says the conversation made him feel better; it spurred him to take action. In the months between his call with Miller and our conversation in October, Stevens left his advertising job and found a new one in staffing. Shortly before we spoke, he and his girlfriend broke up.</p><p>“[I realized] I’m acting like a shitty, non-playable character in a Dungeons and Dragons RPG,” Stevens says, “so I should probably make choices, and pursue some of the good things that could happen if I just [cared] about being a happy person in a real way.”</p><p>Stevens’s story exemplifies a prevailing attitude among many of the people I talked to—that it doesn’t matter if astrology is real; it matters if it’s useful.</p><p>“We take astrology very seriously, but we also don't necessarily believe in it,” says Annabel Gat, the staff astrologer at <em>Broadly</em>, “because it’s a tool for self-reflection, it’s not a religion or a science. It’s just a way to look at the world and a way to think about things.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Beusman, who hired Gat at <em>Broadly,</em> shares her philosophy. “I believe several conflicting things in all areas of my life,” she says. “So for me it’s very easy to hold these two ideas in my head at once. This could not be true at all, and also, I’ll be like ‘Well, I have three planets entering Scorpio next month, so I should make some savvy career decisions.’”</p><p>This attitude is exemplified by <em>The Hairpin’</em>s “Astrology Is Fake” column, by Rosa Lyster, with headlines like “<a href="https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/07/astrology-is-fake-but-leos-are-famous/">Astrology Is Fake But Leos Are Famous</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/04/astrology-is-fake-but-taurus-hates-change/">Astrology Is Fake But Taurus Hates Change.”</a></p><p>It might be that Millennials are more comfortable living in the borderlands between skepticism and belief because they’ve spent so much of their lives online, in another space that is real and unreal at the same time. That so many people find astrology meaningful is a reminder that something doesn’t have to be real to feel true. Don’t we find truth in fiction?</p><p>In describing her attitude toward astrology, Leffel recalled a line from Neil Gaiman’s <em>American Gods</em> in which the main character, Shadow, wonders whether lightning in the sky was from a magical thunderbird, “or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. And of course they were. That was the point after all.”</p><p>If the “astrology is fake but it’s true” stance seems paradoxical, well, perhaps the paradox is what’s attractive. Many people offered me hypotheses to explain astrology’s resurgence. Digital natives are narcissistic, some suggested, and astrology is a navel-gazing obsession. People feel powerless here on Earth, others said, so they’re turning to the stars. Of course, it’s both. Some found it to be an escape from logical “left-brain” thinking; others craved the order and organization the complex system brought to the chaos of life. It’s both. That’s the point, after all.</p><p>To understand astrology’s appeal is to get comfortable with paradoxes. It feels simultaneously cosmic and personal; spiritual and logical; ineffable and concrete; real and unreal. It can be a relief, in a time of division, not to have to choose. It can be freeing, in a time that values black and white, ones and zeros, to look for answers in the gray. It can be meaningful to draw lines in the space between moments of time, or the space between pinpricks of light in the night sky, even if you know deep down they’re really light-years apart, and have no connection at all.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedMaura DwyerThe New Age of Astrology2018-01-16T08:30:00-05:002018-02-12T10:53:24-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-550034In a stressful, data-driven era, many young people find comfort and insight in the zodiac—even if they don’t exactly believe in it.<p>The defining feature of conversation is the expectation of a response. It would just be a monologue without one. In person, or on the phone, those responses come astoundingly quickly: After one person has spoken, the other replies in an average of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/the-secret-life-of-um/547961/?utm_source=feed">just 200 milliseconds</a>.</p><p>In recent decades, written communication has caught up—or at least come as close as it’s likely to get to mimicking the speed of regular conversation (until they implant thought-to-text microchips in our brains). It takes more than 200 milliseconds to compose a text, but it’s not called “instant” messaging for nothing: There is an understanding that any message you send can be replied to more or less immediately.</p><p>But there is also an understanding that you don’t <em>have</em> to reply to any message you receive immediately. As much as these communication tools are designed to be instant, they are also easily ignored. And ignore them we do. Texts go unanswered for hours or days, emails sit in inboxes for so long that “Sorry for the delayed response” has gone from earnest apology to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sorry-for-the-delayed-response">punchline</a>.</p><p>People don’t need fancy technology to ignore each other, of course: It takes just as little effort to avoid responding to a letter, or a voicemail, or not to answer the door when the Girl Scouts come knocking. As Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University who studies language and technology, puts it, “We’ve dissed people in lots of formats before.” But what’s different now, she says, is that “media that are in principle asynchronous increasingly function as if they are synchronous.”</p><p>The result is the sense that everyone could get back to you immediately, if they wanted to—and the anxiety that follows when they don’t. But the paradox of this age of communication is that this anxiety is the price of convenience. People are happy to make the trade to gain the ability to respond whenever they feel like it.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>While you may know, rationally, that there are plenty of good reasons for someone not to respond to a text or an email—they’re busy, they haven’t seen the message yet, they’re thinking about what they want to say—it doesn’t always feel that way in a society where everyone seems to be on their smartphone all the time. A Pew survey <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/26/chapter-1-always-on-connectivity/">found</a> that 90 percent of cellphone owners “frequently” carry their phone with them, and 76 percent say they turn their phone off “rarely” or “never.” In <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139004">one small 2015 study</a>, young adults checked their phones an average of 85 times a day. Combine that with the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/ignoring-people-for-phones-is-the-new-normal-phubbing-study/486845/?utm_source=feed">increasing social acceptability</a> of using your smartphone when you’re with other people, and it’s reasonable to expect that it probably doesn’t take <em>that</em> long for a recipient to see any given message.</p><p>“You create for people an environment where they feel as though they could be responded to instantaneously, and then people don’t do that. And that just has anxiety all over it,” says Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>It’s anxiety-inducing because written communication is now designed to mimic conversation—but only when it comes to timing. It allows for a fast back-and-forth dialogue, but without any of the additional context of body language, facial expression, and intonation. It’s harder, for example, to tell that someone found your word choice off-putting, and thus to correct it in real-time, or try to explain yourself better. When someone’s in front of you, “you do get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face,” Turkle says.</p><p>In last month’s viral <em>New Yorker </em>short story “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person">Cat Person</a>,” a young woman embarks on a failed romantic relationship with a man she meets at the movie theater where she works. They only go on one date in the story; they get to know each other primarily over text. When the affair ends messily, it reveals not only how the bubble of romantic expectations can be popped by reality’s needle, but also how weak digital communication is as a scaffolding on which to build an understanding of another person.</p><p>In <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kristen-roupenian-2017-12-11">an interview</a>, the story’s author, Kristen Roupenian, said the piece was inspired by “the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.” Indeed, even for the people we already know, we increasingly rely on contextless forms of communication. This puts an unusually large burden on the words themselves (and maybe some emojis) to convey what is meant. And each message, and each pause in between messages, takes on outsize importance.</p><p>“Text messages become marks on rocks to be analyzed and sweated over,” Turkle says.</p><p>It’s not always easy to figure out what someone meant to convey by using a certain emoji, or by waiting three days to text you back. Different people have different ideas about how long it’s appropriate to wait to respond. As Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-sometimes-unintentional-subtext-of-digital-conversations/524106/?utm_source=feed">wrote in <em>The Atlantic</em></a><em>, </em>the signals that are sent by <em>how</em> people communicate online—the “metamessages” that accompany the literal messages—can easily be misinterpreted:</p><blockquote>
<p>Human beings are always in the business of making meaning and interpreting meaning. Because there are options to choose from when sending a message, like which platform to use and how to use it, we see meaning in the choice that was made. But because the technologies, and the conventions for using them, are so new and are changing so fast, even close friends and relatives have differing ideas about how they should be used. And because metamessages are implied rather than stated, they can be misinterpreted or missed entirely.</p>
</blockquote><p>This metamessage opacity spawns thousands of <em>other </em>text messages a year, as people enlist their friends to help interpret exactly what their romantic interest meant by a certain turn of phrase, or whether a week-long radio silence means they’re being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosting_(relationships)">ghosted.</a> (The <em>New Yorker</em> parodied this collaborative textual analysis in a video in which a group of women gather, war-room style, to answer the question “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZARdRcbh_E">Was It a Date?</a>”)</p><p>Features intended to add clarity—like <a href="https://medium.com/@jameslynden/why-does-everyone-hate-read-receipts-we-did-some-research-to-find-out-11f224cd7974">read receipts</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/fashion/texting-anxiety-caused-by-little-bubbles.html?mtrref=www.google.com">the little bubble with the ellipses</a> in iMessage that tells you when someone is typing (which is apparently called the “typing awareness indicator”)—often just cause more anxiety, by offering definitive evidence for when someone is ignoring you or started to reply only to put it off longer.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>But just because people know how stressful it can be to wait for a reply to what they thought would be an <em>instant</em> message doesn’t mean they won’t ignore others’ messages in turn.</p><p>Sometimes people don’t respond as a way of deliberately signaling they’re annoyed, or that they don’t want to continue a relationship. Turkle says sometimes taking a long time to write back is a way of establishing dominance in a relationship, by making yourself look simply too busy and important to reply.</p><p>But oftentimes, people are just trying to manage the quantity of messages and notifications they receive. In 2015, the average American was receiving 88 business emails per day, <a href="https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf">according to the market research firm Radicati</a>, but only sending 34 business emails per day. Because—who has the time to respond to 88 emails a day? Maybe someone isn’t responding because they’ve realized the <a href="http://time.com/money/3956968/cell-phone-alert-productivity/">interruption of a notification negatively affects their productivity</a>, so they’re ignoring their phone to get some work done.</p><p>I find myself ignoring or procrastinating even important messages, and ones I want and intend to respond to. I had to create a bright red “Needs Response” email label to battle my own “delayed response” problem. I regularly read texts, think “I’ll respond to that later,” and then completely forget about it. Working memory—the brain’s mental to-do list—can only hold so much at once, and when notifications get crammed in with shopping lists and work tasks, sometimes it springs a leak.</p><p>“A lot of the time what’s happening is people have five conversations going on, and they just can’t really be intimate and present with five different people,” Turkle says. “So they kind of do a triage, they prioritize, they forget. Your brain is not a perfect instrument for processing texts. But it will be interpreted as though it really was a conversation, and so you can hurt people.”</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Still, even though instant written communication can be overwhelming and anxiety-inducing, people prefer it. Americans <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-americans-texting-00327-biz-20150326-story.html">spend more time</a> texting than talking on the phone, and texting is the most <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/179288/new-era-communication-americans.aspx">frequent form of communication</a> for Americans under 50.</p><p>While texting is <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/12/20/global-digital-communication-texting-social-networking-popular-worldwide/">popular worldwide</a>, Baron, of American University, thinks that a strong preference for communication that can be easily ignored is a particularly American attitude. “Americans have far fewer manners in general in their communication than a lot of other societies,” she says. “The second issue is a real feeling of empowerment. I think we have become a version of power freaks, not just control freaks.”</p><p>In a <a href="https://tidsskrift.dk/law/article/view/6173">survey</a> Baron conducted in 2007 and 2008 of students in several countries including the United States, the things that people said they liked most about their phones were often related to control. One American woman said her favorite thing was “Constant communication when I want it (can also shut it off when I don’t).”</p><p>“What I have seen in this country, and I don’t know if it’s a national trait, is people wait until they think they have the perfect thing to say, as though relationships can be managed by writing the perfect thing,” Turkle says. “And I think that is something we pay a very high cost for.”</p><p>In Baron’s survey, people also mentioned feeling controlled by their phones—bemoaning how dependent they were on the devices, and how the constant connectivity made them feel obligated to respond.</p><p>But texts and emails don’t create as big of an obligation as phone calls, or a face-to-face conversation. When young adults are interviewed about why they don’t like making phone calls, they <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-millennials-scared-talking-phone-100000499.html">cite</a> a distaste for how “invasive” they are, and a reluctance to place that burden on someone else. Written instant messages create a smokescreen of plausible deniability if someone doesn’t feel like responding, which can be relieving for the hider, and frustrating for the seeker.</p><p>More than anything, what the age of instant communication has enabled is the ability to deal with conversation on our own terms. We can respond right away, we can put it off for two days, or never get around to it at all. We can manage several different conversations at once. “Sorry, I was out with friends,” we might say, as an excuse for not texting someone back. Or, “Sorry, I just need to text this person back real quick,” we might say while out with friends.</p><p>As these things become normal, it creates an environment where we are only comfortable asking for slivers of people’s distracted time, lest they ever obligate us to give them our full and undivided attention.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedAlexey Boldin / Shutterstock / The AtlanticHow It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails2018-01-11T15:33:00-05:002018-01-12T12:04:04-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-550325Digital messages mimic the speed of real conversation, but often what people like best is the ability to put them off.<p>When one person asks another a question, it takes an average of 200 milliseconds for them to respond. This is so fast that we can’t even hear the pause. In fact, it’s faster than our brains actually work. It takes the brain about half a second to retrieve the words to say something, which means that in conversation, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/the-incredible-thing-we-do-during-conversations/422439/?utm_source=feed">one person is gearing up to speak</a> before the other is even finished. By listening to the tone, grammar, and content of another’s speech, we can predict when they’ll be done.</p><p>This precise clockwork dance that happens when people speak to each other is what N.J. Enfield, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, calls the “conversation machine.” In his book <i><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780465059942">How We Talk</a>, </i>he examines how conversational minutiae—filler words like “um” and “mm-hmm,” and pauses that are longer than 200 milliseconds—grease the wheels of this machine. In fact, he argues, these little “traffic signals” to some degree define human communication. What all human languages have in common, and what sets our communication apart from animals, is our ability to use language to coordinate <i>how</i> we use language.</p><p>I hopped into the conversation machine with Enfield for a very meta chat about the big impacts of tiny words and pauses on human interaction. An edited and condensed transcript of our interview is below.</p><hr><p><b>Julie Beck</b>: Can you explain what the “conversation machine” is and why it’s unique among animals?</p><p><b>N.J. Enfield: </b>When we’re having a conversation, because of the entirely cooperative nature of language, we form a single unit. Certain social cognitions that humans have—the capacity to read other people’s intentions and the capacity to enter into true joint action—allow us to connect up to each other in interaction and ride along in this machine.</p><p>Obviously, animals communicate in a range of interesting and complex ways. But where I draw the line is the moral accountability that humans have in interaction. If one person doesn’t do the appropriate thing, for example not answering a question when it’s being asked, we can be held to account for that. We don’t see that in animals. [In humans], one individual can say: “Why did you say that?” Or “Please repeat that.” You don’t see animals calling others out for their failures, asking why did they say that, or could they repeat that. [What’s unique in humans] is the capacity for language to refer back to itself.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>It seems like conversation is always operating on two levels. One is we’re talking about whatever it is we’re talking about, and at the same time, on this more meta level, we’re monitoring the conversation itself and steering it in the direction we want it to go.</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>Exactly. In the book, I mention a psychologist by the name of Herb Clark, at Stanford. He’s made the point for years that language is a tool for coordinating joint action. Let’s say you and I are moving house. All day we’re going to be using language to coordinate our activity. When we lift up a table, we’ll say, like, “One, two, three, lift.” We’re using language to coordinate our physical activity. Herb Clark points this out, and then he says language is used in exactly that way to coordinate the very activity of using language. We might be talking about a subject like what are we going to do on the weekend or whatever, but at the same time we’re using all these traffic signals to coordinate the activity of talking itself. We’re sending little signals like, “Wait, I’m not ready to finish my turn yet,” “What was that? I didn’t catch what you said,” “Yes, I’m still paying attention to you.” Language regulates itself.</p><p><b>Beck:</b> One of the ways we do that is how quickly people respond to each other, right? You write that people usually respond to each other in a conversation within 200 milliseconds. What if you take longer to respond? What signal does that send?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>It could mean a few things. The fact that this is average, 200 milliseconds, suggests people are aiming for that. So if you are late, it suggests you were not able to hit that target because of some trouble in finding the words you wanted. Or maybe you didn’t hear what was said, or maybe you were distracted in some way. That delay is caused directly by some kind of processing problem. And if you ask people difficult questions, their answers will tend to be delayed</p><p>One of the big traffic signals that manages that is these hesitation markers like “um” and “uh,” because they can be used as early as you like. Of course, they don’t have any content, they don’t tell you anything about what I’m about to say, but they do say, “Wait please, because I know time’s ticking and I don’t want to leave silence but I’m not ready to produce what I want to say.”</p><p>There’s another important reason for delay, and that is because you are trying to buffer what we call a “dis-preferred response.” A clear example would be: I say “How about we go and grab coffee later?” and you’re not free. If you’re free and you say, “Yeah, sure, sounds good,” that response will tend to come out very fast. But if you say “Ah, actually no, I’m not really free this afternoon, sorry,” that kind of response is definitely going to come out later. It may have nothing to do with a processing problem as such, but it’s putting a buffer there because you’re aware saying “No” is not the thing the questioner was going for. We tend to deliver those dis-preferred responses a bit later. If you say “no” very quickly, that often comes across as blunt or abrupt or rude.</p><p>The way we play with those little delays, others are very sensitive to what that means. A full second is about the limit of our tolerance for silence. Then we will either assume the other person’s not going to respond at all, and we just keep speaking, or we might pursue a response.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but one of the things that they tell you to do if you’re doing an interview is to just wait. If they’re not responding, just sit there quietly, because people get uncomfortable and then they just keep talking.</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>Exactly. The interesting thing about it is you as an interviewer have to suppress quite a strong tendency to jump into that space. It’s a skill you’ve got to learn to do. I think people naturally don’t feel comfortable with that silence. Once you’ve got that one second going by, somebody’s got to do something. Unless it’s a situation where you’re with your loved ones in your house or you’re on a long car drive or something like that. Obviously, we can lapse into silence and that’s not a problem, but if we’re in the middle of a to-and-fro conversation, we’re generally not going to let that happen.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>So I’m going to transcribe this Q&amp;A later, and I’m going to edit all of those filler words like “um” and “uh” and “well” out of this interview, as I always do. But you write that these words are actually extremely important to conversation. What am I going to lose by cutting all of that out of this transcript?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>I think it’s the right thing to do, to edit it out when you write things down. You’re not going to lose anything too significant, and the reason is you’ve changed the context completely in which people are going to consume those words. At the moment, the words I’m producing are being interpreted by you in real time. Things never come out perfectly, and we have to edit on the fly. That’s what these words do. What they’re doing is telling you, “No, that word is not what I meant, I’ve doubled back and I’m now going to replace that word with this word.” Or, “Wait a second, I’m about to get the word I’m looking for.” But as soon as you transcribe those, people are not consuming the words at the same time and place as I’ve created them. Those “ums” and “uhs” just become superfluous.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>So you don’t need the words that you use to edit yourself anymore because I’m literally editing you?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>Exactly. The thing about my book is that as a reader, you don’t know how many times I’ve rephrased a sentence. But you can’t hide that from someone in interaction because you’ve got the time pressure of turn taking. What we’re doing, it’s messy, there’s no getting around that. And that is completely hidden from view when you write something down and publish it because no one’s going to get access to all the drafts. But conversation is all draft.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Another thing you mentioned that I thought was super interesting was the way people use “um” as a way to claim more conversational space for themselves. Can you talk about that?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>In any form of interaction, we don’t have access to each other’s minds. It’s the classic problem of human life in a way. Things like “ums” and “uhs” signal there’s some delay in processing. But as a speaker, what I can do is exploit those kinds of signals. I can use them dishonestly. I can use something like “um” to give the overt signal that I’m having some sort of trouble with processing, but in reality, all I’m doing is trying to claim more ground and get you to keep waiting for me to finish.</p><p>All words can be used to lie. Whether they’re nouns and verbs, or whether they’re traffic signals, we can exploit them in dishonest ways. If you want to game the system, and all you want to do is hold the floor, then words like “um” can be exploited in that way. Obviously, there are limits to it. People are sensitive to these things, and after a while if you’re trying to dominate the floor, people will either wise up and grab it back or they will just get sick of you.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>Another thing I do in interviews all the time, that I’m doing right now and I’m also going to cut out of the transcript, is I say “mm-hmm” a lot while the person is talking. It makes sense; it’s me just signaling that I’m still listening. But how important is that to our experience of conversation? If I wasn’t “mm-hmm”-ing, would that make a difference to how our conversation goes?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>Yeah, it would make a big difference. When you’re saying “Mm-hmm, uh-huh,” you’re really playing an important role in the smooth operation of this conversation machine. In the book, I talk about a study done by Janet Bavelas in Canada, with her colleagues. They brought people into the lab, they asked them to get into pairs, and they’d just randomly nominate one of them and say, “Think of a near-miss scenario you had and tell that to the other person.” The listener will look at them, they’ll nod, say “Uh-huh, mm-hmm,” and when the person gets to the punchline, they’ll say things like “Wow.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Then they had a special condition where they tried to distract the listener. They said, “You have to press this button underneath the desk every time the person who’s telling their near-miss scenario uses a word that begins with the letter T.” It completely distracted the listeners from actually following along the content of the story. They produced many fewer of those “uh-huhs” and “mm-hmms.” It also meant the timing of them was kind of out of whack, and they didn’t really recognize when the speaker had reached the climax of the story—the moment when they’re supposed to say “Oh, wow.” They showed that when you distract the listener, then the storyteller tends to circle back and repeat themselves. They essentially become a less proficient and less fluent storyteller. It was a powerful demonstration of precisely the importance of those types of feedback markers for the performance of the person who is telling the story itself.</p><p><b>Beck: </b>You talk a lot in the book about the “moral architecture” of conversation. Explain what that means in the context of these little traffic signals. What does using words like “um” have to do with morality?</p><p><b>Enfield: </b>Morality’s a strong word. When you use that word, people think, “Oh you’re talking about is it okay to have sex with animals” or whatever. Thinking about grand moral questions. I’m talking about a much simpler code. In general, morals tell us how we should live. In the moral architecture of language, they tell us how we should talk. What the moral code does is it licenses us to hold other people accountable to that code. Like, “Hey I asked you a question,” that would be an example. I might not be saying it explicitly but I’m implying, “That’s bad. You shouldn’t be silent when I’m asking you a question, you should respond.”</p><p>When it comes to little words, I produce “um” and “uh” as a signal to you that I know I should be speaking right now. The right thing to do is to be speaking fluently, moving the conversation forward. The whole motivation for my producing those little traffic signals is to make clear that, despite current appearances, I am aware of and I’m following the basic stipulations of what it takes to produce an appropriate conversation. It’s that whole moral architecture that human beings have, it’s the root of so much of our cultural life and our social life: the defining of what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, and policing those things and judging others on the basis of those things. And in these extremely subtle ways it’s right there in every conversation that we have.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedIan Ross Pettigrew / Getty / The AtlanticThe Secret Life of 'Um'2017-12-10T08:00:00-05:002017-12-10T08:00:03-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547961How filler words and tiny pauses keep conversations from going off the rails<p>One year ago today, I stared across a vast sea of “I Voted” stickers. Everywhere my head turned on the street, and everywhere my cursor roamed online, American flags were stuck to people’s lapels, fun souvenirs from doing a civic duty.</p><p>The Hillary Clinton supporters in my News Feed had a particular excited glow to them, a sense of pride that they had helped to accomplish what was then thought by many to be a done deal—the election of the first woman president. But for many Democrats, the day that had begun with smiling selfies ended in tears. One year later, Clinton voters might prefer to forget how they felt while standing in the voting booth. But Facebook remembers.</p><p>For the past few years, Facebook has welcomed its users to the site by showing them a memory: something that happened on the same date, but one or two or 10 years ago. Almost immediately, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8315897/facebook-on-this-day-nostalgia-app-bringing-back-painful-memories">as <em>The Verge </em>reported</a>, this “On This Day” feature began surfacing things people didn’t want to be reminded of—posts announcing the death of a loved one, or apartment fires. For some Clinton supporters, last Election Day falls under the same category.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I'm good, thanks! <a href="https://t.co/gnmNLc2Bv0">pic.twitter.com/gnmNLc2Bv0</a></p>
— Alexandra Svokos (@asvokos) <a href="https://twitter.com/asvokos/status/928267995834605568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Hello Facebook hi yes of course I would love to see what I posted one year ago todOH JESUS GOD NO NOT THIS</p>
— Peter Stein (@PeterTheCrate) <a href="https://twitter.com/PeterTheCrate/status/928271000780857345?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>“I think people are still hurting,” says Danielle Butterfield, who was the deputy director of digital advertising for Clinton’s campaign, and is now the ad director at the progressive advocacy organization Priorities USA. “A lot of my friends are honestly probably choosing to log off for the day and avoid some of those happy memories.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Social media becomes an odd place when the narratives we tell about our lives take a sharp turn. People curate their digital lives to present a certain story about themselves, and when the world disrupts that story, with a death or a divorce or a professional failure, their social-media profiles can become dissonant. Unless you go through and delete them, happy-couple photos stick around, even after relationship statuses have been updated.</p><p>This dissonance happened on a large scale last November 8, as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/when-facebook-becomes-a-funeral-procession/507086/?utm_source=feed">wrote at the time</a>. Posts by Clinton voters processing their shock and disappointment appeared alongside their happy photos from earlier in the day, thanks to the nonchronological design of Facebook’s feed. And today, Facebook is dredging these posts up from the depths and slapping a whimsical cartoon banner on them, as it does for all the “memories” it shows.</p><p>Some Clinton supporters do welcome these memories of the good times. “I saw photos this morning of me and my friends [last Election Day] and we were all extremely excited about what was to come later in the day,” Butterfield says. “I’m personally trying really hard to see the silver lining. The perspective that we had at that point in time was one of optimism. Now, I have to remind myself of how much optimism I did have last year, to remind myself that it’s still okay to be hopeful for the future. And I think seeing some of those positive memories in my feed is really helpful.”</p><p>Patrick Stevenson, who was the director of state digital programs on Clinton’s campaign and now works for the strategy firm Blue State Digital, sees these memories of his time with the campaign as personal mementos more than reminders of a loss. “For that reason I'm glad to be reminded of them,” he told me in an email. “Donald Trump has taken so goddamn much from me, I'm not going to let him ruin some really fun and happy moments and memories any more than I have to.”</p><p>It used to be that the structure of our calendars asked us to contemplate where we were exactly a year ago only occasionally. On holidays, mostly—birthdays and the New Year especially. Days dedicated to reflecting on the passage of time.</p><p>But on Facebook, every day is dedicated to the passage of time. The social network was always an obsessive catalog of the present, furiously snatching the delicate butterflies of this moment or that and pinning them to a digital corkboard. But what’s the point in a collection if you don’t display it? So Facebook has also become a unique sort of nostalgia machine—the sort that shows you events as you portrayed them <em>at the time</em>, for better or worse, without the blurring haze of memory.</p><p>A woman will not be president, not for at least three more years, anyway. That’s three more November 8ths on which to be reminded of where we were one year ago today. And three more November 8ths for the people who remember that day as dark to look at the hope and excitement in their own eyes, before they knew, and make their own meaning out of it. Unless, of course, they go into their settings and ask not to be reminded of November 8, 2016.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedAdrees Latif / ReutersJill Huennekens of Milwaukee attends Hillary Clinton's election-night rally.'We Thought You'd Like to Look Back on This Post from 1 Year Ago’2017-11-08T13:54:00-05:002017-11-10T15:01:46-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545327Reexperiencing Election Day 2016 through the social network’s “memories” feature can be painful for those who lost.<p>There’s a full-body sigh that happens when you cross the threshold of your home for the first time after a long trip. And I do mean <em>full-</em>body: No sooner have your limp arms discarded your luggage on the floor and your lungs filled themselves with that sweet familiar home air than your gut feels the sudden, emphatic need to poop.</p><p>For me, it happens within minutes, if not seconds. And I’m not alone.</p><p>“This is indeed a very familiar story,” says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of <em>Psychology in the Bathroom</em>. “Most people feel more comfortable going to the bathroom in familiar—and private—surroundings.”</p><p>It’s sort of the inverse of another bowel-related vacation experience: traveler’s constipation. Many people find themselves clogged while they’re away from home, often because they’re uncomfortable pooping in unfamiliar bathrooms. It can also be because they are eating less poop-friendly foods on vacation, or because unfamiliar bacteria in a new environment are throwing off their gut microbiomes, as Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/all-i-got-for-christmas-was-constipation/422046/?utm_source=feed">reported</a> for <em>The Atlantic </em>in 2015. (Of course, if you eat the wrong meal, you could suffer traveler’s diarrhea instead.)</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>“In my view the experience of ‘unburdening’ upon returning from a trip is largely a Pavlovian response: The home is a safety signal, signifying that this is the right place to go,” Haslam told me over email. This is likely to be the case whether or not you were particularly constipated during your trip. “If there has been any inhibition or retention at all during the trip the relaxation response is likely to kick in when you come home,” he says.</p><p>This is largely the explanation I expected for this phenomenon, which I shall henceforth be calling the “returnee’s release.” And it makes total sense. But there’s a deeper explanation here—one that involves the mysterious ways our bodies respond to changes in environment. And if you embrace the reasoning of one scientist, it may lead you to question the existence of your very soul.</p><p>That scientist is Jack Gilbert, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, and the director of the university’s Microbiome Center. I spoke with him in an attempt to understand whether there is a physical call-and-response between my home and my body that might trigger the need to make a deposit in the porcelain bank. Or is it simply that I feel more comfortable at home?</p><p>“What is ‘more comfortable?’” Gilbert asks. “Why do you feel more comfortable at home?”</p><p>Because it’s familiar, I guess, I say. All my stuff is there.</p><p>“Right, but that’s not <em>you</em> thinking that, remember that,” he says, meaning there is no mystical entity that makes up my self. “Unless you’re highly spiritual, then the soul doesn’t really exist. There’s no ghost in the machine. You’re just a sensory programming device.”</p><p>He devotes a large portion of this interview to really hammering home the point that the brain does not <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer">“store” memories</a>, like a computer. “All you’re doing, when you try to recall something, is triggering sensory simulacra of that experience,” he says.</p><p>So back to the returnee’s release. When you enter your home, you get certain sensory inputs—smells, sights, a familiar creak in the floor, perhaps. All aspects of the environment, from the temperature of the room to the feeling of the doorknob in your hand to the microbes all around you, contribute to the sensation of “being more comfortable at home.”</p><p>“‘More comfortable’ is an emotional state, but emotions are physiological responses,” Gilbert says. “So ‘more comfortable’ is a physiological state. It’s a way in which your body responds to its environment.”</p><p>“When you get back into your home, your glucose tolerance will change,” he continues. “Your adrenaline pumping will change, and the energy sensors of your muscles will change, altering your actual respiration, how much energy your burn, and how much fat you deposit. When you get back into your home your sleep patterns will change, because the hormones that control sleep will be altered. All of these factors influence how quickly food moves through your gut.”</p><p>We don’t really know exactly <em>how</em> the body responds to certain sensory stimuli, he notes. Just that it does.</p><p>So it’s not only that people feel safer and more comfortable pooping at home, but that the complex sensory stew of the home environment may in some way be physically moving the mail along.</p><p>“We are essentially automata responding to environmental cues,” Gilbert says. “I’m pretty sure I can train you as a human being to pee when you smell peppermint. That’s an example of how much of an automaton you are. It would be technically possible to do that.”</p><p>And as Haslam noted, we’re already trained in a more mundane way. “You have a lot of experience defecating and urinating in your preferred toilet,” he writes, “which becomes strongly associated with those acts, so just being in its presence triggers the relaxation response that allows you to release the inhibitions that led you to ‘hold it in’ while in unfamiliar surroundings.” And it’s not just while traveling: As I’ve<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-private-lives-of-public-bathrooms/360497/?utm_source=feed"> previously reported</a>, some people find themselves inhibited in any public bathroom.</p><p>If nothing else, the returnee’s release is certainly a stark reminder of how much our bodies are held in thrall by their surroundings. “You came in saying your question is stupid,” Gilbert chastises me. “It’s not. Your question is paramount to the fact that we are not in control of our environment. There is no free will.”</p><p>Think about <em>that</em> the next time you drop the kids off at the pool.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedUnicode / The AtlanticThere's No Toilet Like Home2017-11-01T10:44:00-04:002017-11-01T12:08:09-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544544Why coming back to a familiar environment triggers a sudden urge to go to the bathroom<p><em>To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. —Ecclesiastes 3:1-2</em></p><p>The autumn is the time to pluck up that which is planted, and, often, to arrange it in aesthetically pleasing centerpieces and porch displays. That’s right. <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers">It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.</a></p><p>That trumpeting proclamation is the title of an essay Colin Nissan wrote for <em>McSweeney’s Internet Tendency</em> in 2009. The piece is an aggressively exuberant fist-pumping celebration of fall, and of the reason for the season: decorative gourds, of course. Ever since it was published, much like you can feel the wind changing outdoors as summer gives way to fall, you can tell when the weather is changing online, because eager tweeters with pumpkins in their eyes will start posting the essay once more. It is trotted out every fall, much like the “wicker fucker” Nissan dusts off in his opening paragraph in order to jam it full of “shellacked vegetables.”</p><p>Why? “Because it’s not summer, it’s not winter, and it’s not spring,” he writes. “Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it’s fall, fuckers.”</p><p>The piece is the <em>Catch-22</em> of online humor essays. Its title has become a shorthand for the thing it describes: autumn and the attendant mania some have for its trappings. It has shaped the very language the internet uses to talk about the season. If decorative gourds aren’t your thing, here are some other seasonal descriptions Twitter has recently conjured up:</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">IT’S TRANSITIONAL JACKET SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS <a href="https://t.co/bCybR6qvt6">https://t.co/bCybR6qvt6</a></p>
— Andrew Beaujon (@abeaujon) <a href="https://twitter.com/abeaujon/status/915955319444000768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 5, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">It’s Scorpio season, motherfuckers</p>
— amil (@amil) <a href="https://twitter.com/amil/status/922442093842321408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">It’s David S Pumpkins season, motherfuckers.</p>
— Dash (@dashlet) <a href="https://twitter.com/dashlet/status/923227954125172736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 25, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">It’s Rub Carmex on your Nostril Season motherfuckers</p>
— Spooky Scary Skele J (@Starship_J) <a href="https://twitter.com/Starship_J/status/923940933904797696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 27, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>I would venture to say fall is the most polarizing season, and not just because it’s when American elections take place. It has the most enthusiastic fans, and thus attracts vehement haters. For every person excited for pumpkin-spice products to hit the shelves, there is a curmudgeon online calling them basic and bemoaning the inescapable flavor of nutmeg.</p><p>Nissan, though famous for his eloquence in describing gourd-love, is a jack of many trades. He writes humor pieces for various publications, works in advertising, and is a voice-over actor (I definitely recognize his voice from commercials, and <a href="http://www.colinnissan.com/VOpage.html">you might too</a>. Also he’s never done a Nissan car commercial, I asked.)</p><p>I spoke with Nissan about the origins and legacy of the piece. While he was largely unaware of the Fall Culture Wars, he gamely offered his opinion on some of fall’s most famous fixtures. An edited, condensed transcript of our conversation follows.</p><hr><p><strong>Julie Beck: </strong>Take me back to 2009. What inspired the piece? Was there a specific gourd display that touched you, personally?</p><p><strong>Colin Nissan: </strong>I don’t know if there was a singular moment or anything. I just love fall, and it all just came out in one giant spewing that was that piece.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Who was your editor at <em>McSweeney’s</em>?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>It’s a guy by the name of Christopher Monks. He’s awesome; he’s been there for years. He works out of what he calls “<em>McSweeney’s</em> World Headquarters,” but it’s his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. They once did a Kickstarter where I actually signed like 270 gourds or something. I went to his house and sat at his dining-room table. It was quite a scene. There was this gigantic pile of gourds and we sat there all day and signed and boxed them up.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Do you remember what his reaction was when you pitched the piece? What did you guys talk about in the editing stages?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>They did a thing recently where he put up on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/colin-nissans-of-14381596">this patrons’ page</a>, on the <em>McSweeney’s </em>site, our email exchange from when I first submitted it to him. It started out with me saying, “I’m not totally sure how you feel about the word ‘motherfucker,’ but here’s a piece for your consideration.” So then it just went back and forth with very funny detailed exchanges about specific swears and it became funnier than the piece, I think, the whole exchange.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Are there any good jokes that didn’t make it in?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>One of his main contributions was, I think I [originally] had a wider range of swears in there, and he said very seriously: “I just like sticking with the word fuck. I think there's just something more pleasing about [that].” So I ended up kind of limiting it to that word mostly.</p><p>And the ending, I can’t remember exactly what it was ...</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s just, “Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!”</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>The original ending was one thing that [Monks] commented on. I can’t remember what the original ending was. But I’m so glad he did, because it got super dark. It was not a good ending. So I went back and reworked the ending and it ended up being what it is.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>What was the reaction to the piece at the time? Did it immediately become really popular or was it more of a slow burn?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>It was pretty fast. I remember Chris emailing me. This thing very quickly went to the top spot on their page and I think he said within a few days it had a million hits. I think at the time it was fairly unusual for the site, so that was exciting.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s become a perennial favorite. Every season there’s tweets, you’ll see like: “It’s ‘It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers’ Season, Motherfuckers.” Why do you think that is? How has it lasted the test of time?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I really don’t know. It’s always really fun to see it come back, but I’m always like, I can’t believe it’s had the staying power that it’s had. I just think, as it was for me to write it, maybe it’s just a release for people.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>You write for a lot of different places and do a lot of voice-over acting and all that. Do you feel like the gourd has cast a shadow over your life in any way?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>The only thing is the first couple years, people who had read the piece, if they met me I think they just thought I was like the piece. They were like, “Why aren’t you swearing? Why aren’t you funnier?” I just got that feeling like I should be outrageous in person when I’m talking, which I’m not.</p><p>But writing-wise, when a piece does well like that, as a writer you just try to figure out—was there some magical combination or something that I did that connected with people and worked? And can I repeat that somehow? I think the first five drafts of things I wrote afterward were in that exact similar swearing tone, which is obviously not the right thing to do. And I never did anything with them. My first instinct was maybe I can do that again. You really can’t.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Do you think you have figured out what the magical combination was for that piece?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I just think it’s tricky, because swearing like that in a piece nine times out of 10 will backfire. In most cases people would be like: “It’s cheap and easy to swear like that and can’t you come up with jokes without swearing?” But there was something about this piece. I think possibly one of the reasons is that the guy in the piece was just pumped. He was swearing like crazy but he was never angry. I think if he was angry maybe it wouldn’t have worked as well. But there’s something about the excitement and the swearing that just seemed to work.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Do you feel like, writing this piece, the fact that it comes up again every fall, has that shaped your experience of autumn in any way?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>It’s really fun to see people posting photos of their kids and quoting it. I’ve heard people say it randomly.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Just in the world?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Yeah, I have a couple times. It definitely makes the season a little extra fun for me.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> There’s now a culture war of sorts over fall. There’s been something of a backlash to people’s enjoyment of things like apple picking, or pumpkin-spice stuff.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Oh, that’s funny. This is the perfect example of what’s happening in the world today, where I’m in my little media silo, my bubble, and my world loves fall, so that’s all I see. I honestly haven’t seen much of the backlash.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>What would you say to the haters of fall?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I just don’t know how you can hate it. It’s cozy, there’s delicious foods, the foliage is beautiful. There are built-in activities to fall. Maybe it’s the people who love summer so much and they feel like fall just means winter’s coming. But fall is it’s own beast. You just have to relish it.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>I was hoping that you might be down, from your position as an authority on fall, to offer a verdict on various fall-related things. Can we do a lightning round?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Yeah, sure.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Apple picking.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Too humid. I remember as a kid it was amazing and crisp, and now I feel like the last four seasons I’ve just been sweating through my shirt while apple picking. Which kind of wrecks it. But other than that, I love it, it was one of my favorite things ever.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>We got to climate change really quickly.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I know.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Okay, corn mazes.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I’ve only done one and it was, I would say, terrifying.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Hay rides.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Bumpy. All of a sudden, I feel like everything I’m saying is negative. How did I end up being negative about every fall thing you’re mentioning? I would say bumpy and itchy. But fun.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Sweaters.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Not a sweater guy, honestly. I end up looking like Paddington Bear whenever I wear sweaters.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>What about scarves?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>No, I don’t know how to tie a scarf. I can’t do that either.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>I’m trying to find a positive one.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I know. I guess I hate fall. Maybe we got to a deeper meaning here for the piece.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Oh my God, the internet is going to kill me. What about candy corn?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Love candy corns.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>That’s a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/candy-corn-debate_us_59d23eb8e4b09538b50998f0">real controversy</a>.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I thought the only controversy is if you eat each color, if you eat the white then eat the yellow then eat the orange. I do it that way, layer by layer.</p><p><strong>Beck: “</strong>Leaf peeping?” Do you know this term?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Oh yeah. I love foliage. Big fan. Love the colors.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>The end of daylight-saving time?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I just never know when it is. I’ve never gotten it right once in my life.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Pumpkin-spice lattes?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Not a fan. I’m not a hot milk kind of guy.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>What about just things that are pumpkin-spice flavored? That you would find in grocery stores?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I don’t know about prepackaged stuff, but I love pumpkin bread, that type of stuff. What do they have that’s pumpkin spice?</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Oh, everything. Cereals, bagels, cookies. Just throw a stick in Trader Joe’s, you’ll hit something.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I don’t think I’ve done much of that. I’m the worst fall person ever to interview apparently.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>You do seem very disconnected from many of the fall controversies online.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>I’m just very gourd-focused.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>How many gourds do you have in your house right now?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Currently, let's see. [<em>Ed: At this point, I can hear him moving what sound like gourds in the background.</em>] About ... 12.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Are they all decorative or are they for eating?</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>All decorative.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Respect.</p><p><strong>Nissan: </strong>Thank you.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedSean Gallup / Getty'It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers' Will Never Die2017-10-30T10:00:00-04:002017-10-30T10:37:18-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544232The author of the classic humor piece on his “spewing” of joy for autumn<p>“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” This is a line from John Green’s young-adult book <em>Looking for Alaska</em>. It’s pretty, and melancholy, and <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/search/imagining+the+future+is+a+kind+of+nostalgia">very popular on Tumblr</a>. It’s also scientifically accurate.</p><p>Imagining the future <em>is </em>a kind of nostalgia, because humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories. This is how things you do over and over again become routine. For example, you know generally what your day will be like at the office tomorrow based on what your day at the office was like today, and all the other days you’ve spent there. But memory also helps people predict what it will be like to do things they haven’t done before.</p><p>Say that you are imagining your future wedding (if you’ve never gotten married before). You probably see it as a scene—at a church, or on the beach, or under a wooded canopy in a forest with the bridal party all wearing elf ears. There are flowers, or twinkling lights, or mason jars everywhere. You can envision the guests, how they might look, what your soon-to-be spouse is wearing, what look they have on their face. All of these details come from your memory—of weddings you’ve been to before, as well as weddings you’ve seen depicted in pop culture, or in photo albums. The scene also relies on your memory of your friends and family.</p><p>“When somebody’s preparing for a date with someone they’ve never been on a date with before, or a job interview—these situations where we don’t have past experience, that’s where we think this ability to imagine the future really matters,” says Karl Szpunar, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. People “can take bits and pieces, like who’s going to be there, where it’s going to be, and try to put all that together into a novel simulation of events.”</p><p>The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well. This was the case with the famous patient known by his initials, “H.M.” H.M. had epilepsy, and to treat it, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649674/">he received an experimental surgery</a> in 1953 that removed several portions of his brain, including almost his entire hippocampus, which is a vital brain structure for memory. After the surgery, H.M. had severe amnesia, and also appeared to struggle with the future. A researcher once asked H.M., “What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=isGu8iwuQxIC&amp;pg=PA62&amp;lpg=PA62&amp;dq=h.m.+whatever+is+beneficial&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=VM6gXS2Ro4&amp;sig=TSvDohnDyHTVnf6ha8TmPTXI1hk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwipzIi5s-vWAhWH3YMKHYn2A2IQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&amp;q=h.m.%20whatever%20is%20ben">He replied</a>, “Whatever is beneficial.”</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/543009/" width="640"></iframe></p><p>Since then, functional MRI scans have allowed researchers to determine that many of the same brain structures are indeed involved in both remembering and forecasting. In a study Szpunar did, he and his colleagues looked at activity in the brain’s default network, which includes the hippocampus as well as regions that involve processing personal information, spatial navigation, and sensory information. They found that activity in many of these regions was “almost completely overlapping” when people remembered and imagined future events, Szpunar says.</p><p>Researchers are still trying to pin down exactly how different brain regions are involved in these processes, but much of it has to do with the construction of scenes. You can remember facts, sure, and you can make purely informational predictions—“We will have jet packs by 2050”—but often, when you remember, you are <i>reliving</i> a scene from your memory. You have a mental map of the space; you can “hear” what’s being said and “smell” smells and “taste” flavors; you can feel your emotions from that moment anew. Similarly, when you imagine something you might experience in the future, you are essentially “pre-living” that scene. And just as memories are more detailed the more recent they are, imagined future scenes <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/DARPCA">are more detailed</a> the nearer in the future they are.</p><p>“It takes so much cognitive effort to come up with detailed simulations,” Szpunar says. “So it’s like, why would you spend all that time when it’s not going to happen for 30 or 40 years? Whereas if it’s something happening this weekend, and you’re like ‘How’s this date going to go?’—those things, people just anguish over them and really come up with these detailed simulations.”</p><p>When people try to imagine the more distant future—that classic interview question, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”—they tend to rely heavily on something called a cultural life script. This is the progression of events that a life in a certain culture is expected to contain. In much of the West, the cultural life script is something like: go to school, move out of your parents’ house, get one or more college degrees, find a job, fall in love, get married, buy a house, have kids, retire, have grandchildren, die. Not everyone expects their life to contain all of those events, but they’re aware of those milestones and will generally tell their life story using them as a framework. The further into the future you try to imagine, the more unknowns there are, so people reach for these events.</p><p>“We can’t really imagine or think that far into the future, and we can’t remember that far back, if we don’t have this cultural life script as a kind of skeleton for our life story,” says Annette Bohn, a professor of psychology at Aarhus University in Denmark. In studies Bohn has done with adolescents, their conception of a script seemed to develop in parallel with their ability to remember the past and imagine the future. (At the other end of the life course, older people’s ability to imagine the future declines in tandem with their memory.)</p><p>It’s not hard to see how this ability to imagine the future gives humans an <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666704/">evolutionary advantage</a>. If you can plan for the future, you’re more likely to survive it. But there’s are limitations as well. Your accumulated experiences—and your cultural life script—are the only building blocks you have to construct a vision of the future. This can make it hard to expect the unexpected, and it means people often expect the future to be more like the past, or the present, than it will be.</p><p>In a similar vein, people tend to underestimate how much their feelings and desires will change over time. Even though they know that their personalities have changed a lot in the past, they have <a href="http://www.danielgilbert.com/Quoidbach%20et%20al%202013.pdf">a tendency to think</a> that the person they are now is the person they will be forever. This applies more broadly, too. You can see it in the technological advances imagined in science fiction. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-actual-future-is-so-much-cooler-than-back-to-the-future-predicted/384073/?utm_source=feed">wrote</a>, while <em>Back to the Future II </em>(made in 1989 and set in 2015) made a lot of canny predictions—it got videoconferencing and drones right—it also thought people would still be using pay phones and fax machines. Which makes sense, given how ubiquitous those technologies were at the time the film was made.</p><p>There’s also an “optimistic, extreme positivity bias toward the future,” Bohn says. To the point that people “always say future events are more important to their identity and life story than the past events.” Talk about being nostalgic for the future.</p><p>But it might help people temper their expectations if they keep in mind that even though they can dream up detailed, novel scenes of things yet to come, their imagined futures are really just projections of their pasts. The future holds more surprises—and, potentially, more disappointments—than we might predict.</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedVCG Wilson / Corbis / GettyA futuristic rendering of human life off earth, by Rick Guidice in 1975 for NASA Ames Research CenterImagining the Future Is Just Another Form of Memory2017-10-17T13:24:00-04:002017-10-17T14:03:17-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-542832Humans’ ability to predict the future is all thanks to our ability to remember the past.<p>In 2004, a <em>New York Times </em>reporter<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/the-science-of-secondguessing.html"> asked</a> Stephen Hawking what his IQ was. “I have no idea,” the theoretical physicist replied. “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”</p><p>President Donald Trump seems to think otherwise. After recent reports that Rex Tillerson, his secretary of state, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/tillerson-s-fury-trump-required-intervention-pence-n806451">called him a moron</a>, Trump <a href="https://www.forbes.com/donald-trump/exclusive-interview/#150e909dbdec">told <em>Forbes</em></a>: “I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”</p><p>As Philip Bump at <em>The Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/10/a-brief-history-of-trump-challenging-people-to-iq-tests/?utm_term=.a797f504a81c">reported</a>, Trump has a history of boasting about his IQ, and challenging others to IQ tests. His supporters have also taken up this cause for him in the past. In December 2016, a chart made the rounds saying that Trump’s IQ was 156, putting him above most past presidents. (The median score is 100.) The fact-checking website <em>Snopes</em> <a href="http://www.snopes.com/donald-trumps-intelligence-quotient/">rated this claim</a> as false: While the chart was based on <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3792393?origin=JSTOR-pdf&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">a real study</a>, the study didn’t have real IQ scores for most presidents (it estimated their IQs based on other factors), Trump wasn’t included in the study, and most importantly,“Donald Trump’s true intelligence quotient is unknown,” the article reads.</p><p>Scientists disagree on how useful IQ tests are as a measurement of intelligence. There’s <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6874785">research</a> to show that IQ can change over the lifespan, for example. And <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/07/the-truth-about-iq/22260/?utm_source=feed">some say</a> that it doesn’t account for things like emotional intelligence or creativity. But “IQ” remains an easy shorthand for referring to intelligence, with the added bonus of sounding scientific, quantifiable, and official.</p><p>It isn’t totally surprising that Trump seems to think his IQ is exceptional. If asked, most people would say they are smarter than the average person.<strong> </strong>(They would also likely say they’re more competent, kinder, more honest, and more responsible.) This is a <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b64b/bd5408a9f3e1dbba183f29f154a0a95c9037.pdf">well-studied phenomenon</a> in psychology known as the “better-than-average effect” or “self-enhancement.”</p><p>Even so, people might be reluctant to publicize their sense of superiority, because such boasts tend to be poorly received. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281781036_Why_Self-enhancement_Provokes_Dislike_The_Hubris_Hypothesis_and_the_Aversiveness_of_Explicit_Self-superiority_Claims">One study</a> found that while bragging about your own good qualities didn’t necessarily make people dislike you, bragging about yourself <em>in relation to others</em> did. For example, saying “I am a good student” probably wouldn’t bother anybody, but saying “I’m a better student than others” would. Bragging about your better-than-average intelligence, then, would likely make other people think you’re insulting them—and make them <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167217703951">feel aggressive toward you</a> as a result.</p><p>“We see this consistently, that the claim, at least in this culture, of being above average is just frowned upon,” says Joachim Krueger, a professor of psychology at Brown University who has studied bragging. “There are also conversational norms.” There’s an expectation that your good qualities will reveal themselves over time, without you announcing them.</p><p>So if bragging about your intelligence can alienate people, and make you look like a loser (at least to Stephen Hawking), why risk it?</p><p>It feels great, for one thing. People love to talk about themselves—to the point that in one study, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/109/21/8038.full">they turned down money</a> for the opportunity to answer questions about themselves. And the same study found that self-disclosure appears to activate brain regions associated with reward.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>They may also miscalculate how others will react to their boasts. <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/Psychological%20Science-2015-Scopelliti-0956797615573516.pdf">One study</a> found that people often self-promote because they’re trying to make a good impression on others. But they tend to overestimate how much their self-promotion will make other people feel happy for them and proud of them, and underestimate how annoying people will find it.</p><p>Krueger coauthored <a href="http://files.clps.brown.edu/jkrueger/journal_articles/Heck-Krueger-2016.pdf">a study in 2016</a> that found bragging about your superiority comes with a tradeoff. It will make people see you as more competent, but less moral—unless the thing you are bragging about is provably false. Then it makes people see you as incompetent <em>and </em>immoral.</p><p>In a case like Trump’s brag about being smarter than Tillerson, where the validity of his claim is unknown, the research suggests people would err on the side of believing him.</p><p>“My personal opinion of the president’s claims about his own IQ is that he is making a gamble: brag and be thought of as competent (intelligent), and hope that nothing will ever surface that proves his claims wrong,” Patrick Heck, Krueger’s coauthor on the study, told me in an email.</p><p>“Of course there won’t be an IQ test given and then the nation will be informed what score he had and what score Tillerson had, so it’s pure rhetoric,” Krueger says. “In the context of our study if there truly were no other information about him, that would be a slight advantage.”</p><p>But nobody is evaluating Donald Trump based on this claim and this claim alone. Krueger points out that because opinions of the president are already so polarized, people will likely incorporate this latest brag into their existing views of him. If they think he’s a clever politician and a savvy businessman, they’ll likely take his brag at face value. If they already think he’s incompetent and immoral, an unverified claim about his IQ probably<strong> </strong>won’t change that.</p><p>But what if Trump and Tillerson were actually to throw down—intellectually speaking? Mensa International—a society whose members must prove their IQs are in the top 2 percent of the population—has offered <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/354718-mensa-offers-to-host-iq-test-for-trump-and-tillerson">to host an IQ-test showdown</a> between Trump and Tillerson, heaven help us all<strong>.</strong> What if it really happened? And what if Trump were to lose?</p><p>“That’s a crazy hypothetical—you and I know perfectly well that’s not going to happen and Mensa never thought it would happen,” Krueger says. “That's another rhetorical play to throw into the game. But in your hypothetical universe, [if they] take the test and we find that he is 20 points below Tillerson, then according to our study, it would be a false positive and it would be particularly embarrassing.”</p>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedStephane Mahe / Reuters'People Who Boast About Their IQ Are Losers'2017-10-11T05:00:00-04:002017-10-11T09:19:34-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-542544Studies say that bragging about your superiority makes people like you less—so what does Donald Trump hope to gain?